'What Matters Most is What's in Your Heart' vs. 'Evil Thought is Not a Crime': Level of Abstraction in Lay Reasoning on Moral Responsibility

Abstract

When judging morally ambiguous action, how much weight do laypeople place on whether the actor's behavior was (a) driven by a prior goal versus (b) performed under intentional control? Based on a growing research literature in contemporary social-cognitive psychology, we hypothesized that perceivers' emphasis on the prior goal versus intentional control is predicted by how abstractly versus concretely they construe the action. In two experiments, we presented participants with scenarios in which a prior goal and intentional control were or were not present in the actor's mind at the moment of the critical act. In Study 1, participants who received an abstract construal prime rated the actor with a malevolent prior goal but no intentional control more blameworthy than an actor with intentional control but no malevolent prior goal. In contrast, those in the concrete prime condition rated the actor with intentional control but no prior goal more blameworthy than an actor with a prior goal but no intentional control. In Study 2, we replicated this pattern with measured, pre-existing individual differences in chronic construal level. In addition, we used an encoding paradigm to identify the condition in which the relationship between construal level and judgment is mediated by spontaneous extraction of ends-related concepts. Implications for understanding lay conceptions of intention, mens rea, and responsibility, as well as the literature on the interface between psychology and law are discussed.