Department of Philosophy, University College Cork.
Département d'Études Cognitives, École Normale Supérieure.
Psychol Sci. 2020 Nov;31(11):1430-1438. doi: 10.1177/0956797620954492. Epub 2020 Oct 21.
In this article, we describe a hitherto undocumented fallacy-in the sense of a mistake in reasoning-constituted by a negativity bias in the way that people attribute motives to others. We call this the "worst-motive fallacy," and we conducted two experiments to investigate it. In Experiment 1 ( = 323), participants expected protagonists in a variety of fictional vignettes to pursue courses of action that satisfy the protagonists' worst motive, and furthermore, participants significantly expected the protagonist to pursue a worse course of action than they would prefer themselves. Experiment 2 ( = 967) was a preregistered attempted replication of Experiment 1, including a bigger range of vignettes; the first effect was not replicated for the new vignettes tested but was for the original set. Also, we once again found that participants expected protagonists to be more likely than they were themselves to pursue courses of action that they considered morally bad. We discuss the worst-motive fallacy's relation to other well-known biases as well as its possible evolutionary origins and its ethical (and meta-ethical) consequences.
在本文中，我们描述了一个迄今为止未被记录的谬论——从推理错误的意义上说——这是人们归因于他人动机的一种负面偏差。我们称之为“最坏动机谬论”，并进行了两项实验来研究它。在实验 1（n=323）中，参与者期望各种虚构情景中的主角采取满足主角最坏动机的行动，此外，参与者显著期望主角采取比他们自己更糟糕的行动。实验 2（n=967）是对实验 1 的预先注册的尝试复制，包括更广泛的情景；对于测试的新情景，第一个效果没有得到复制，但对于原始情景集则得到了复制。此外，我们再次发现，参与者期望主角比他们自己更有可能采取他们认为道德上不好的行动。我们讨论了最坏动机谬论与其他著名偏见的关系，以及它可能的进化起源及其伦理（和元伦理）后果。
