scholarly journals Judging accidental harm: The interplay between harm severity and intention towards the victim

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Flora Schwartz ◽  
Hakim Djeriouat ◽  
Bastien Trémolière
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Third Parties ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Outcome Severity ◽  
Life Context ◽  
Reasoning Style ◽  
Deliberative Reasoning

When judging a perpetrator who harmed someone accidentally, humans rely on distinct cognitive processes: one that focuses on the victim’s harm and condemns the perpetrator, and another one that examines the perpetrator’s intention and exculpates the perpetrator. The present study investigates how individuals (as third-parties) solve the cognitive tension generated by the judgment of accidental harm by simultaneously manipulating harm severity, the perpetrator’s intention, and by determining the effect of reasoning style. In two pre-registered experiments, participants recruited online completed a moral judgment task consisting of short narratives which depicted the interaction between a perpetrator and a victim in a daily life context. We assessed how participants perceived the perpetrator’s behavior as wrong, blameworthy, and punishment-deserving. In experiment 1 (N = 224), we manipulated the perpetrator’s intent to harm (accidental vs. intentional harm) and the severity of outcome for the victim (mild vs. severe harm). In experiment 2 (N = 210), we used accidental harm scenarios in which we manipulated the perpetrator’s intention towards the victim (positive vs. neutral) and outcome severity (mild vs. severe harm). We additionally assessed participants’ reasoning style in both experiments and explored its role in modulating moral judgment. As expected, participants’ judgment of wrongness and punishment were harsher following severe harm relative to mild harm (experiments 1 and 2), and following intentional as compared to accidental harm (experiment 1). Moreover, participants were more lenient with the perpetrator of accidental harm whose intention towards the victim was positive (experiment 2). Importantly, in both experiments, the perpetrator’s intent not only interacted with outcome severity but also polarized moral judgments in participants with a more deliberative reasoning style, especially following mild harm. These findings extend previous studies by showing that harm severity modulates moral judgment and interacts with intent and reasoning style to shape moral judgment of accidents.

scholarly journals An earlier role for intent in children’s partner choice versus punishment

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Martin ◽  
Kyleigh Leddy ◽  
Liane Young ◽  
Katherine McAuliffe
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Developmental Trajectories ◽  
Partner Choice ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Equal Weight ◽  
Behavioral Differences ◽  
The Many ◽  
Insight Into

Among the many factors that influence our moral judgments, two are especially important: whether the person caused a bad outcome and whether they intended for it to happen. Notably, the weight accorded to these factors in adulthood varies by the type of judgment being made. For punishment decisions, intentions and outcomes carry relatively equal weight; for partner choice decisions (i.e., deciding whether or not to interact with someone again), intentions are weighted much more heavily. These behavioral differences in punishment and partner choice judgments may also reflect more fundamental differences in the cognitive processes supporting these decisions. Exploring how punishment and partner choice emerge in development provides important and unique insight into these processes as they emerge and mature. Here, we explore the developmental emergence of punishment and partner choice decisions in 4- to 9-year-old children. Given the importance of intentions for partner choice decisions¬–from both theoretical and empirical perspectives–we targeted the sensitivity of these two responses to others’ intentions as well as outcomes caused. Our punishment results replicate past work: young children are more focused on outcomes caused and become increasingly sensitive to intentions with age. In contrast, partner choice judgments exhibit sensitivity to intentions at an earlier age than punishment judgments, manifesting as earlier partner choice in cases of attempted violations. These results reveal distinct developmental trajectories for punishment and partner choice judgments, with implications for our understanding of the processes underlying these two responses as well as the development of moral judgment more broadly.

scholarly journals Too rich to be forgiven? Economic resources shape moral judgment of accidental harm

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Flora Schwartz ◽  
Hakim Djeriouat ◽  
Bastien Trémolière
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Economic Resources ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Economic Factors ◽  
Just World ◽  
Political Preferences ◽  
Socio Economic Factors

When judging a perpetrator who harmed someone accidentally, humans rely on distinct cognitive processes: one that focuses on the victim’s harm, and another one that examines the perpetrator’s intention. The present study investigates how moral judgment of accidental harm is influenced by information about the protagonists’ economic resources. In two preregistered online experiments, participants completed a moral judgment task consisting of short narratives which depicted the interaction between a perpetrator and a victim. We manipulated the victim’s economic resources (rich vs. poor victim) in experiment 1, and both the victim’s and perpetrator’s economic resources in experiment 2. We additionally tested whether participants’ income and socio-political attitudes were associated with individual differences in moral judgment of the perpetrator. We found that economic resources influenced moral judgment and interacted with participants’ income and socio-political preferences when information about both the perpetrator’s and victim’s economic resources was available. Participants were overall harsher toward rich perpetrators and just world views predicted forgiveness of the perpetrator depending on the resource asymmetry between the perpetrator and the victim. These findings extend previous work documenting the effect of socio-economic factors on moral judgment and suggest that third-party moral judgment of accident may be sensitive to the agent’s level of economic resources.

Is Empathy Required for Making Moral Judgments?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Deigh
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Psychopathic Personality ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Psychological Profile ◽  
Main Thesis ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Additional Support

This essay is a study of the nature of moral judgment. Its main thesis is that moral judgment is a type of judgment defined by its content and not its psychological profile. The essay arrives at this thesis through a critical examination of Hume’s sentimentalism and the role of empathy in its account of moral judgment. The main objection to Hume’s account is its exclusion of people whom one can describe as making moral judgments though they have no motivation to act on them. Consideration of such people, particularly those with a psychopathic personality, argues for a distinction between different types of moral judgment in keeping with the essay’s main thesis. Additional support for the main thesis is then drawn from Piaget’s theory of moral judgment in children.

Effect of Power on Moral Judgment

1978 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 387-394
Author(s):  
Russell Hamby
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Low Power ◽  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Factorial Design ◽  
High Power ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Need For Power ◽  
Experimenter Effects

Ambiguous effects of power on attributions of moral responsibility for an accident are interpreted to result from the intervening effects of need for power, which is aroused by the anticipation of exercising power over another. 160 subjects from introductory social psychology classes participated in a questionnaire-type experiment comparing effects of high/low carelessness, severe/minor consequences, and high/low power of the attributor in a 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design. In a follow-up experiment 30 subjects were assigned to conditions of high or low power, and their needs for power and moral attributions were measured. High power seemed to arouse need for power, which was curvilinearly related to moral judgments. Those high and low in need for power attributed more moral responsibility to the perpetrator of an accident than those with moderate levels of need for power. The results suggest complicated models of both moral judgments and experimenter effects related to the level or arousal of motivations.

scholarly journals Small-scale societies exhibit fundamental variation in the role of intentions in moral judgment

2016 ◽  
Vol 113 (17) ◽  
pp. 4688-4693 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Clark Barrett ◽  
Alexander Bolyanatz ◽  
Alyssa N. Crittenden ◽  
Daniel M. T. Fessler ◽  
Simon Fitzpatrick ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Narrow Range ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Cultural Variation ◽  
Moral Assessment ◽  
Mitigating Circumstances

Intent and mitigating circumstances play a central role in moral and legal assessments in large-scale industrialized societies. Although these features of moral assessment are widely assumed to be universal, to date, they have only been studied in a narrow range of societies. We show that there is substantial cross-cultural variation among eight traditional small-scale societies (ranging from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist to horticulturalist) and two Western societies (one urban, one rural) in the extent to which intent and mitigating circumstances influence moral judgments. Although participants in all societies took such factors into account to some degree, they did so to very different extents, varying in both the types of considerations taken into account and the types of violations to which such considerations were applied. The particular patterns of assessment characteristic of large-scale industrialized societies may thus reflect relatively recently culturally evolved norms rather than inherent features of human moral judgment.

Developmental Study of Moral Judgments by Japanese Children

1991 ◽  
Vol 68 (3_suppl) ◽  
pp. 1131-1136
Author(s):  
Hirotsugu Yamauchi
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Causal Attribution ◽  
Helping Behavior ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Developmental Study ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Frequency Data ◽  
Japanese Children ◽  
Dual Scaling ◽  
Evaluative Feedback

The purpose of this study was to examine the determinants of causal attribution in the contexts of moral judgment and the developmental shifts of the determinants. Subjects were children in Grades 2, 4, and 6 ( ns = 83, 122, and 84). Moral judgments were measured by asking subjects to provide “evaluative feedback” to an hypothetical child's helping behavior. The method of dual scaling was applied to the frequency data of moral judgments. Two-dimensional solutions show that subjects judged whether the hypothetical child should be rewarded or punished and what amount of reward or punishment was given to the hypothetical child. Developmental shifts were found for moral judgment.

scholarly journals Famine, Affluence, and Amorality

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
David Sackris
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
First Person ◽  
Moral Decision ◽  
Moral Decision Making ◽  
Distinct Kind ◽  
Ordinary Case ◽  
Made In ◽  
The Way

I argue that the debate concerning the nature of first-person moral judgment, namely, whether such moral judgments are inherently motivating (internalism) or whether moral judgments can be made in the absence of motivation (externalism), may be founded on a faulty assumption: that moral judgments form a distinct kind that must have some shared, essential features in regards to motivation to act. I argue that there is little reason to suppose that first-person moral judgments form a homogenous class in this respect by considering an ordinary case: student readers of Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”. Neither internalists nor externalists can provide a satisfying account as to why our students fail to act in this particular case, but are motivated to act by their moral judgments in most cases. I argue that the inability to provide a satisfying account is rooted in this shared assumption about the nature of moral judgments. Once we consider rejecting the notion that first-person moral decision- making forms a distinct kind in the way it is typically assumed, the internalist/externalist debate may be rendered moot.

scholarly journals Priming intuition disfavors instrumental harm but not impartial beneficence

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerio Capraro ◽  
Jim Albert Charlton Everett ◽  
Brian D. Earp
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Moral Dilemmas ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Dimensional Model ◽  
Total N ◽  
Two Dimensional Model ◽  
Do So

Understanding the cognitive underpinnings of moral judgment is one of most pressing problems in psychological science. Some highly-cited studies suggest that reliance on intuition decreases utilitarian (expected welfare maximizing) judgments in sacrificial moral dilemmas in which one has to decide whether to instrumentally harm (IH) one person to save a greater number of people. However, recent work suggests that such dilemmas are limited in that they fail to capture the positive, defining core of utilitarianism: commitment to impartial beneficence (IB). Accordingly, a new two-dimensional model of utilitarian judgment has been proposed that distinguishes IH and IB components. The role of intuition on this new model has not been studied. Does relying on intuition disfavor utilitarian choices only along the dimension of instrumental harm or does it also do so along the dimension of impartial beneficence? To answer this question, we conducted three studies (total N = 970, two preregistered) using conceptual priming of intuition versus deliberation on moral judgments. Our evidence converges on an interaction effect, with intuition decreasing utilitarian judgments in IH—as suggested by previous work—but failing to do so in IB. These findings bolster the recently proposed two-dimensional model of utilitarian moral judgment, and point to new avenues for future research.

Advances in Research on the Model of Intuitive Morality and Exemplars (MIME)

2021 ◽  
pp. 230-249
Author(s):  
Allison Eden ◽  
Ron Tamborini ◽  
Melinda Aley ◽  
Henry Goble
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Selective Exposure ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Dual Process ◽  
Social Perceptions ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Moral Intuitions ◽  
Process Perspective

This chapter describes the model of intuitive morality and exemplars (MIME), which examines connections between moral judgment and exposure to narrative media. The MIME explicates distinct, a priori–defined domains of moral intuitions that cut across cultural boundaries and identifies underlying processes that shape related social perceptions to describe how media and moral judgment are intertwined. The model’s dual-process perspective suggests some moral judgments are determined by quick gut reflexes and others by reflective deliberation. The MIME’s multistage process contains short-term and long-term components. The short-term component describes how exemplars that prime moral intuitions affect the appraisal of media content, which then prompts selective exposure to media that upholds primed intuitions. The long-term component describes how aggregate patterns of exposure to media that upholds primed intuitions encourages further (mass) production of content featuring those intuitions. This reciprocal process describes how media systems and audiences influence the salience of one another’s moral intuitions.

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