Moral asymmetries in judgments of agency withstand ludicrous causal deviance.

Paulo Sousa,Colin Holbrook,Lauren Swiney

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01380

Abstract

Americans have been shown to attribute greater intentionality to immoral than to amoral actions in cases of causal deviance, that is, cases where a goal is satisfied in a way that deviates from initially planned means (e.g., a gunman wants to hit a target and his hand slips, but the bullet ricochets off a rock into the target). However, past research has yet to assess whether this asymmetry persists in cases of extreme causal deviance. Here, we manipulated the level of mild to extreme causal deviance of an immoral versus amoral act. The asymmetry in attributions of intentionality was observed at all but the most extreme level of causal deviance, and, as we hypothesized, was mediated by attributions of blame/credit and judgments of action performance. These findings are discussed as they support a multiple-concepts interpretation of the asymmetry, wherein blame renders a naïve concept of intentional action (the outcome matches the intention) more salient than a composite concept (the outcome matches the intention and was brought about by planned means), and in terms of their implications for cross-cultural research on judgments of agency.

Highlights

Reasoning about causes is a fundamental aspect of human cognition
In our previous work with an American sample, we demonstrated this asymmetry in cases of mild causal deviance, and we argued for a multiple-concepts explanation in which distinct concepts of intentional action are selected in different contexts depending on considerations of blame and credit
Preliminary analyses showed that all three ratings of credit/blame, action, and intentionality were positively intercorrelated, rs ranging from 0.55 to 0.65, ps < 0.001

Summary

Introduction

Reasoning about causes is a fundamental aspect of human cognition. It is unlikely that causal cognition is a homogeneous phenomenon; the human mind is likely to have different causal competencies, which draw on different causal concepts or deploy similar causal concepts differently depending on context (see, e.g., Sperber et al, 1995; Danks et al, 2014). We investigate how causal cognition drives judgments of agency, and how this varies depending on moral context. We investigate judgments of agency in relation to events involving causal deviance, that is, events involving causal chains that are initiated by an agent, that lead to the satisfaction of the agent’s intention, but that do not follow the agent’s plan. An agent intends to hit a target with his rifle, and does hit the target, but not in the planned manner—instead of the bullet going directly into the target, it ricochets off a rock and into the target

Results

Discussion

Conclusion