Liao Yu, Sun Yujia, Li Hong, Deák Gedeon O, Feng Wenfeng
Department of Psychology, School of Education, Soochow University, Suzhou, China.
Brain Function and Psychological Science Research Center, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China.
Front Psychol. 2018 Aug 3;9:1329. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01329. eCollection 2018.
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.
副作用效应（SEE）是指这样一种观察结果：人们对于一个行为是否出于故意的直觉取决于该行为的结果是好是坏。然而，这种不对称的反应并不代表所有受试者的判断（Nichols和Ulatowski，2007）。关于能够调节副作用效应大小的主观因素仍有待探索。因此，当前的研究调查了一个与个体相关的因素，具体而言，成年人对某人行为结果的关心程度是否会影响他们对该人是否有意造成该结果的判断。我们假设，参与者对虚构主体因其行为副作用而应承担责任的判断将取决于他们对副作用领域的关心程度。在两项实验中，关心程度影响了参与者对主体负面意外副作用的意图归因。只有在参与者报告关心程度较高的领域中，才发现对负面副作用的故意性归因强于正面副作用（即副作用效应；Knobe，2003）。此外，关心程度可靠地增加了对负面副作用的故意性归因，但对正面副作用则没有。这些结果表明，对一个领域的关心介导了对负面副作用比对正面副作用更不对称的故意性归因。
