Brown University, Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences, 89 Waterman St., Providence, RI 02912, USA.
Cognition. 2010 Nov;117(2):139-50. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2010.08.002. Epub 2010 Sep 1.
Extant models of moral judgment assume that an action's intentionality precedes assignments of blame. Knobe (2003b) challenged this fundamental order and proposed instead that the badness or blameworthiness of an action directs (and thus unduly biases) people's intentionality judgments. His and other researchers' studies suggested that blameworthy actions are considered intentional even when the agent lacks skill (e.g., killing somebody with a lucky shot) whereas equivalent neutral actions are not (e.g., luckily hitting a bull's-eye). The present five studies offer an alternative account of these provocative findings. We suggest that people see the morally significant action examined in previous studies (killing) as accomplished by a basic action (pressing the trigger) for which an unskilled agent still has sufficient skill. Studies 1 through 3 show that when this basic action is performed unskillfully or is absent, people are far less likely to view the killing as intentional, demonstrating that intentionality judgments, even about immoral actions, are guided by skill information. Studies 4 and 5 further show that a neutral action such as hitting the bull's-eye is more difficult than killing and that difficult actions are less often judged intentional. When difficulty is held constant, people's intentionality judgments are fully responsive to skill information regardless of moral valence. The present studies thus speak against the hypothesis of a moral evaluation bias in intentionality judgments and instead document people's sensitivity to subtle features of human action.
现有的道德判断模型假设，一个行为的意图先于责任的归属。诺伯（2003b）质疑这种基本顺序，并提出相反的观点，即一个行为的恶劣或应受指责的程度会引导（并因此不当地影响）人们对意图的判断。他和其他研究人员的研究表明，应受指责的行为被认为是有意的，即使代理人缺乏技能（例如，幸运地开枪打死某人），而同等的中性行为则不是（例如，幸运地击中靶心）。本研究的五项研究为这些引人注目的发现提供了另一种解释。我们认为，人们将之前研究中（如杀人）所考察的具有道德意义的行为视为由基本行为（扣动扳机）完成的，即使是不熟练的代理人，对这种基本行为仍有足够的技能。研究 1 至 3 表明，当这种基本行为不熟练或不存在时，人们就不太可能将杀人视为有意的，这表明即使是不道德的行为，意图判断也受到技能信息的指导。研究 4 和 5 进一步表明，像击中靶心这样的中性行为比杀人更难，而困难的行为则不太可能被判断为有意的。当难度保持不变时，人们的意图判断完全取决于技能信息，而与道德价值无关。因此，本研究反对在意图判断中存在道德评价偏差的假设，而是记录了人们对人类行为细微特征的敏感性。
