Abstract

The side-effect effect (SEE) is the observation that people’s intuition about whether an action was intentional depends on whether the outcome is good or bad. The asymmetric response, however, does not represent all subjects’ judgments (Nichols and Ulatowski, 2007). It remains unexplored on subjective factors that can mediate the size of SEE. Thus, the current study investigated whether an individual related factor, specifically, whether adults’ intensity of caring about an outcome of someone’s actions influences their judgments about whether that person intended the outcome. We hypothesized that participants’ judgments about fictional agents’ responsibility for their action’s side-effects would depend on how much they care about the domain of the side-effect. In two experiments, the intensity of caring affected participants’ ascription of intention to an agent’s negative unintended side-effect. The stronger ascription of intentionality to negative than positive side-effects (i.e., the SEE; Knobe, 2003) was found only in domains in which participants reported higher levels of caring. Also, the intensity of caring increased intentionality attributions reliably for negative side-effects but not for positive side-effects. These results suggest that caring about a domain mediates an asymmetrical ascription of intentionality to negative more than positive side-effects.

Highlights

  • Intention attributions carry great importance within contexts ranging from legal systems to schools, families, and informal social groups (Darley and Shultz, 1990; Ohtsubo, 2007; Lagnado and Channon, 2008; Young and Saxe, 2009)

  • Because participants’ responses to both high- and low-IoC scenarios were binary outcomes (i.e., Intended: Yes or No), and the two scenarios were administrated within subjects, we employed binary generalized estimating equations (GEE, SPSS22) models to investigate the main effect of valence and subjective care level, as well as their interactive effect on participants’ intention ascription

  • GEE is an extension of the generalized linear model for regressions involving observations that arise from repeated within-subject measurement, and it allows for binary dependent data

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Summary

Introduction

Intention attributions carry great importance within contexts ranging from legal systems to schools, families, and informal social groups (Darley and Shultz, 1990; Ohtsubo, 2007; Lagnado and Channon, 2008; Young and Saxe, 2009). If the unintended side-effect of the project is a benefit to the environment, only ∼20% of adults judge that the CEO intended to Subjective Care Mediates Ascription of Intention help the environment. This striking asymmetry has since been replicated in a variety of scenarios in addition to the original CEO scenario (e.g., Knobe and Mendlow, 2004; Malle, 2006; Nadelhoffer, 2006; Pellizzoni et al, 2009; Vonasch and Baumeister, 2017), and is termed the side-effect effect (SEE)

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