Department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers University.
Georgetown University Law Center, Georgetown University.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2018 Nov;147(11):1728-1747. doi: 10.1037/xge0000459.
The presumption of innocence is not only a bedrock principle of American law, but also a fundamental human right. The psychological underpinnings of this presumption, however, are not well understood. To make progress, one important task is to explain how adults and children infer the goals and intentional structure of complex actions, especially when a single action has more than one salient effect. Many theories of moral judgment have either ignored this intention inference problem or have simply assumed a particular solution without empirical support. We propose that this problem may be solved by appealing to domain-specific prior knowledge that is either built-up over the probability of prior intentions or built-in as part of core cognition. We further propose a specific solution to this problem in the moral domain: a good intention prior, which entails a rebuttable presumption that if an action has both good and bad effects, the actor intends the good effects and not the bad effects. Finally, in a series of novel experiments we provide the first empirical support - from both adults and preschool children - for the existence of this good intention prior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).
无罪推定不仅是美国法律的基本原则，也是一项基本人权。然而，这种推定的心理基础还没有得到很好的理解。为了取得进展，一个重要的任务是解释成年人和儿童如何推断复杂行为的目标和意图结构，特别是当一个单一的行为有多个显著效果时。许多道德判断理论要么忽略了这种意图推断问题，要么只是简单地假设了一个没有经验支持的特定解决方案。我们提出，这个问题可以通过诉诸特定领域的先验知识来解决，这些知识要么是基于先前意图的概率建立起来的，要么是作为核心认知的一部分建立起来的。我们进一步在道德领域提出了一个具体的解决方案：一个好的意图先验，这意味着，如果一个行为既有好的效果又有坏的效果，那么行为者意图是好的效果而不是坏的效果。最后，在一系列新的实验中，我们首次从成年人和学龄前儿童那里提供了支持——证明了这种良好意图先验的存在。
