Are people who exert more effort in a task seen as more moral?

I was happy to review Round 2 of this project and learn about the authors' results. The authors followed the protocol they described in Round 1. I will thus focus my review on the presentation of the findings and structure of the paper.

Overall, I thought the presentation of the paper made sense, though there are some tweaks that I believe will help the flow of the paper and help readers understand the contributions and stakes of the research.

First, I think the authors should spend more time in the introduction and discussion talking about the implications (societal and theoretical) of the null age findings. In the introduction, I was left wondering what the interpretation of a null effect might be, and I was left with that question unresolved by the time I finished the paper. The Bayesian statistical approach used by the authors provides moderate to strong evidence of a null age effect. I want to authors to grapple with this more, what it means for the social issues they start the paper with and for theories about the generalizability of effort moralization effects. E.g., the lack of moderation by age seems to further support the idea that effort moralization is generalizable, beyond the effects that were replicated in different cultures than prior work. As written, I am not clear on the way these data further illuminate psychological theory or contemporary issues in society. To be clear, I believe these data can be written up such that they provide clear value, but I think some revisions to the introduction and discussion will be necessary to accomplish that. 

I also found the presentation of the warmth and competence results to be surprising, given those analyses were not discussed earlier in the manuscript. Since it was not part of the authors' focal hypotheses, I might relegate those analyses to the supplemental materials to open up more space for discussing the issues I described above. Alternatively, if the authors think it is important to keep those analyses in the main text, I would ask them to set up those analyses a bit better, to provide a reader a sense of why these results are important to highlight despite not being directly connected to the main replication or extension. 

Lastly, there were some verb tense and other grammatical issues throughout the manuscript that, while minor, should be addressed. E.g., on page 18, it reads "We have no a priori assumptions..." when it should read "We had no...", presumably this is a leftover from the Round 1 version of the manuscript. I'd advise the authors to carefully review the manuscript to address these types of issues. 

After the authors address these issues, I believe the report will be ready to ship out to journals for publication. I congratulate the authors on conducting interesting research and wish them well in their revisions and future endeavors. 

P.S. The pay deservingness findings were interesting and a little perplexing to me. The authors may want to discuss these findings a bit more through the lens of cultural differences in the importance of morality in partner choice decision-making. The pay deservingness finding isn't a partner choice outcome, but it may be a proxy for it. I believe Duncan Stibbard-Hawkes has some work on cultural differences on the role of moral judgment in partner choice, though I can't find the paper at the moment. This isn't essential to discuss in the current paper, but it may be useful for the authors to consider when bulking up their theoretical discussion. 

Jared Celniker

I think you did a great job. The paper still needs some copy-editing to put everything to the past tense and there are some typos (e.g., "adopted" instead of "adapted") but aside from that, I think this paper is ready. Congrats!

This is an excellent report and I think it should be accepted. I have no real issues and congraulate the authors on a job well done.

Here are responses to specific question:

2A. Whether the data are able to test the authors’ proposed hypotheses (or answer the proposed research question) by passing the approved outcome-neutral criteria, such as absence of floor and ceiling effects or success of positive controls or other quality checks.

Yes
 
2B. Whether the introduction, rationale and stated hypotheses (where applicable) are the same as the approved Stage 1 submission. This can be readily assessed by referring to the tracked-changes manuscript supplied by the authors.

This was harder for me to tell because there were many tracked changes. Some of this might simply be moving things around, but I am not sure. As far as I can tell, there were changes to the introduction, but I am ok with them. But I urge the editor to double check. With all the green marking, it was hard for me to say.
 
2C. Whether the authors adhered precisely to the registered study procedures.

Yes
 
2D. Where applicable, whether any unregistered exploratory analyses are justified, methodologically sound, and informative.

Yes
 
2E. Whether the authors’ conclusions are justified given the evidence.

Yes

I sign all my reviews,

Michael Inzlicht