Giffin Carly, Lombrozo Tania
Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley.
Cogn Sci. 2018 May;42 Suppl 1:105-133. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12504. Epub 2017 Jun 2.
An actor's mental states-whether she acted knowingly and with bad intentions-typically play an important role in evaluating the extent to which an action is wrong and in determining appropriate levels of punishment. In four experiments, we find that this role for knowledge and intent is significantly weaker when evaluating transgressions of conventional rules as opposed to moral rules. We also find that this attenuated role for knowledge and intent is partly due to the fact that conventional rules are judged to be more arbitrary than moral rules; whereas moral transgressions are associated with actions that are intrinsically wrong (e.g., hitting another person), conventional transgressions are associated with actions that are only contingently wrong (e.g., wearing pajamas to school, which is only wrong if it violates a dress code that could have been otherwise). Finally, we find that it is the perpetrator's belief about the arbitrary or non-arbitrary basis of the rule-not the reality-that drives this differential effect of knowledge and intent across types of transgressions.
一个行为者的心理状态——她是否明知故犯且怀有不良意图——通常在评估一个行为的错误程度以及确定适当的惩罚水平方面起着重要作用。在四项实验中，我们发现，与道德规则相比，在评估违反常规规则的行为时，这种关于认知和意图的作用要弱得多。我们还发现，这种认知和意图作用的减弱部分是由于这样一个事实，即常规规则被认为比道德规则更具随意性；道德违规行为与本质上错误的行为（例如殴打他人）相关联，而常规违规行为与只是偶然错误的行为（例如穿着睡衣上学，只有在违反了本可不同的着装规范时才是错误的）相关联。最后，我们发现，驱动这种跨违规类型的认知和意图差异效应的是行为者对规则的随意或非随意基础的信念，而非实际情况。
