Abstract
Debates about moral judgments have raised questions about the roles of reasoning, culture, and conflict. In response, the cognitive prototype model explains that over time, through training, and as a result of cognitive development, people construct notions of blameworthy and praiseworthy behavior by abstracting out salient properties that lead to an ideal representation of each. These properties are the primary features of moral prototypes and include social context interpretation, intentionality, consent, and outcomes. According to this model, when the properties are uniform and coherent, they depict a promoral or immoral prototype, relative to the orientations of the properties. A promoral prototype is represented by an action that is supported by the culture, intentionally benevolent or other-regarding, consensual, and resulting in positive outcomes. An immoral prototype is an action that is condemned by the culture, intentionally malevolent or self-serving, lacking consent, and resulting in negative outcomes. It is hypothesized that moral prototypes will result in a high level of agreement and require effortless processing. Alternatively, when properties conflict or the situation deviates from the prototype, a nonprototype will result. It is hypothesized that nonprototypical situations will act as a source of moral disagreement and may require more effortful processing.
Highlights
In the second study, 481 adult participants read scenarios that represented moral prototypes and nonprototypes
The findings in this study suggest that the abstract transgressions and contextualized prototypes generate similar judgments and result in perfect or near perfect agreement that the situation is wrong
The justifications provided additional evidence that the participants inferred the orientation of an inexplicit property or relied on a default immoral prototype when presented with an abstract transgression, more interview-centered research is needed to further test this hypothesis
Summary
481 adult participants read scenarios that represented moral prototypes and nonprototypes. They were asked to rate the scenarios according to levels of right/wrong, praise/blame, and difficulty. The promoral prototype conditions resulted in significantly higher levels of rightness and praise than most or all of the nonprototypes, and the immoral prototypes received higher levels of wrongfulness and blame than most or all of the nonprototypes in each respective scenario set. None of the nonprototype conditions received significantly higher levels of right/wrong or praise/blame than their respective prototype conditions in each scenario set. The difficulty level did not yield consistent patterns across the four scenario sets.
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