Abstract
The reduced importance of intent when judging purity (vs. harm) violations is some of the strongest evidence for distinct moral modules or systems: moral pluralism. However, research has indicated that some supposed differences between purity and harm moral domains are due to the relative weirdness of purity vignettes. This weirdness might lead to a failure to attend to or correctly process relevant mental state information. Such attentional failures could offer an alternative explanation (to separate moral systems) for the reduced exculpatory value of innocent intentions for purity violations. We tested if the different role of intent in each domain was moderated by individual differences in attentional efficiency, as measured by the Attention Network Task. If attentional efficiency explains the reduced exculpatory value of innocent intentions in purity (vs. harm) violations, then we would expect those high (vs. low) in attentional efficiency not to show the reduced exculpatory effect of innocent intentions in the purity (vs. harm) domain. Consistent with moral pluralism, results revealed no such moderation. Findings are discussed in relation to various ways of testing domain-general and domain-specific accounts of the mental state × domain effect, so that we might better understand the architecture of our moral minds.
Highlights
Slapping a sibling in the face is morally wrong, whereas performing the exact same action accidentally, as you go to high five them, is not
This carefully designed and well-powered experiment does not find any evidence that attentional failure explains the reduced exculpatory value of innocent intentions in purity violations
We postulated that failure to integrate mental state information into the computations underpinning moral cognition for purity violations might be caused by the weirdness of the purity vignettes employed in this literature [9]
Summary
Slapping a sibling in the face is morally wrong, whereas performing the exact same action accidentally, as you go to high five them, is not. Research suggests that unexpected and surprising stimuli, which we argue purity violations like incest and drinking urine are clear cases of, compete for attentional resources and can lead to “surprise-induced blindness” in attentional processes [12] This may explain the reduced exculpatory effect of innocent intentions in the purity (vs harm) domain without having to evoke separate, domain-specific moral systems (see Fig 1 for a graphical depiction of these alternative explanations). The weirdness of purity violations may compete with standard moral cognition for attentional resources, leading to the failure to properly encode or process mental state information in these cases (for an analogous argument, see [11]) If this is the case, the orienting ANT score should moderate the mental state × domain effect. If the reduced exculpatory value of innocent intentions in purity (vs. harm) violations is due to attentional failure, the mental state × domain interaction should be
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