scholarly journals Agents’ moral character shapes people’s moral evaluations of accidental harm transgressions

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Flora Schwartz ◽  
Hakim Djeriouat ◽  
Bastien Trémolière
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Moral Character ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Online Experiments ◽  
Two Factors

Previous research has documented that judging someone responsible for an accident mainly relies on considerations about the outcome endured by the victim and the intention to cause harm. Yet, we question how these two factors may be influenced by the morality ascribed to the agent, independently of the action itself. In two online experiments, we determined whether information about the moral character of agents influenced moral judgment of accidental harm. Participants were presented with short narratives depicting accidental harm scenarios and were asked to report their judgment of the perpetrator. In experiment 1 (N = 337), we manipulated the perpetrator’s morality and warmth orthogonally. In experiment 2 (N = 271), we focused on morality and simultaneously manipulated the perpetrator’s and victim’s moral character. In both experiments, we found that the perpetrator’s moral character influenced judgments of acceptability, blame, punishment and compensation. Participants were more forgiving toward perpetrators of high morality relative to low morality, and the effect of the moral character was greater than the effect of warmth (experiment 1). The victim’s moral character also influenced moral judgments but to a lesser extent than that of the perpetrator and did not interact with the moral character of the perpetrator (experiment 2). Participants were harsher toward the perpetrator when the victim was described as having high morality as compared to low morality, and compensation for the victim also aligned with the victim’s morality. These results show that third-party moral judgment is influenced by the moral character of agents despite information implying that harm was unintended.

scholarly journals Elevated moral condemnation of third-party violations in multiple sclerosis patients

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Indrajeet Patil ◽  
Liane Young ◽  
Vladimiro Sinay ◽  
Ezequiel Gleichgerrcht
Keyword(s):  
Multiple Sclerosis ◽  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Moral Condemnation ◽  
Severe Punishment ◽  
Multiple Sclerosis Patients ◽  
Judg Ments

Recent research has demonstrated impairments in social cognition associated with multiple sclerosis (MS). The present work asks whether these impairments are associated with atypical moral judgment. Specifically, we assessed whether MS patients are able to integrate information about intentions and outcomes for moral judgment (i.e., appropriateness and punishment judg- ments) in the case of third-party acts. We found a complex pattern of moral judgments in MS patients: although their moral judgments were comparable to controls’ for specific types of acts (e.g., accidental or intentional harms), they nevertheless judged behaviors to be less appropriate and endorsed more severe punishment across the board, and they were also more likely to report that others’ responses would be congruent with theirs. Further analyses suggested that elevated levels of externally oriented cognition in MS (due to co-occurring alexithymia) explain these effects. Additionally, we found that the distinction between appropriateness and punishment judgments, whereby harmful outcomes influence punishment judgments to a greater extent than appropriateness judgments, was preserved in MS despite the observed disruptions in the affective and motivational components of empathy. The current results inform the two-process model for intent-based moral judgments as well as possible strategies for improving the quality of life in MS patients.

The development of intent-based moral judgment and moral behavior in the context of indirect reciprocity: A cross-cultural study

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (6) ◽  
pp. 525-533
Author(s):  
Jing Li ◽  
Wenwen Hou ◽  
Liqi Zhu ◽  
Michael Tomasello
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Moral Behavior ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Chinese Children ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Developmental Origins ◽  
Indirect Reciprocity ◽  
Cross Cultural Study ◽  
German Children

The current study aimed to investigate the cultural differences in the developmental origins of children’s intent-based moral judgment and moral behavior in the context of indirect reciprocity. To this end, we compared how German and Chinese children interpret and react to antisocial and prosocial interactions between puppets. An actor puppet performed either a positive or negative act toward a prosocial or antisocial target puppet with the intention to cause harm or not; 197 three and five-year-old children participated as a third party and were asked to judge the actor puppet’s behavior and to distribute stickers. Results showed that 3-year-old Chinese children were able to take intention and context into account when making moral judgments and distributing resources, whereas German children did not show sensitivity to intention until the age of 5. These findings suggest that culture may mediate children’s intent-based moral judgment and moral behavior in the context of indirect reciprocity.

scholarly journals The effect of cognitive load on intent-based moral judgment

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Martin ◽  
Marine Buon ◽  
Fiery Andrews Cushman
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Cognitive Load ◽  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Causal Responsibility ◽  
Developmental Shift ◽  
Two Factors

When making a moral judgment, people largely care about two factors: Who did it (causal responsibility), and did they intend to (intention)? Since Piaget’s seminal studies we have known that as children mature they gradually place greater emphasis on intention, and less on mere bad outcomes, when making moral judgments. Today we know that this developmental shift has several signature properties. Recently, it has been shown that when adults make moral judgments under cognitive load they exhibit a pattern similar to young children; that is, their judgments become notably more outcome-based. Here, we show that all of the same signature properties that accompany the outcome-to-intent shift in childhood characterize the “intent-to-outcome” shift obtained under cognitive load in adults. These findings hold important implications for current theories of moral judgment.

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 Moderators of the Liking Bias in Judgments of Moral Character

2021 ◽  
pp. 014616722110132
Author(s):  
Konrad Bocian ◽  
Wieslaw Baryla ◽  
Bogdan Wojciszke
Keyword(s):  
Information Processing ◽  
Moral Character ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
The Impact

Previous research found evidence for a liking bias in moral character judgments because judgments of liked people are higher than those of disliked or neutral ones. This article sought conditions moderating this effect. In Study 1 ( N = 792), the impact of the liking bias on moral character judgments was strongly attenuated when participants were educated that attitudes bias moral judgments. In Study 2 ( N = 376), the influence of liking on moral character attributions was eliminated when participants were accountable for the justification of their moral judgments. Overall, these results suggest that although liking biases moral character attributions, this bias might be reduced or eliminated when deeper information processing is required to generate judgments of others’ moral character.

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 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.

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