Kirfel Lara, Phillips Jonathan
Department of Psychology, Stanford University, 450 Jane Stanford Way, Building 420, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
Cognitive Science Program, Dartmouth College, Winfred-Raven House, 5 Maynard Street, Hanover, NH, 03755 USA.
Cognition. 2023 Feb;231:105316. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105316. Epub 2022 Nov 17.
Norm violations have been demonstrated to impact a wide range of seemingly non-normative judgments. Among other things, when agents' actions violate prescriptive norms they tend to be seen as having done those actions more freely, as having acted more intentionally, as being more of a cause of subsequent outcomes, and even as being less happy. The explanation of this effect continue to be debated, with some researchers appealing to features of actions that violate norms, and other researcher emphasizing the importance of agents' mental states when acting. Here, we report the results of two large-scale experiments that replicate and extend twelve of the studies that originally demonstrated the pervasive impact of norm violations. In each case, we build on the pre-existing experimental paradigms to additionally manipulate whether the agents knew that they were violating a norm while holding fixed the action done. We find evidence for a pervasive impact of ignorance: the impact of norm violations on non-normative judgments depends largely on the agent knowing that they were violating a norm when acting. Moreover, we find evidence that the reduction in the impact of normality is underpinned by people's counterfactual reasoning: people are less likely to consider an alternative to the agent's action if the agent is ignorant. We situate our findings in the wider debate around the role or normality in people's reasoning.
违反规范已被证明会影响一系列看似不规范的判断。除其他外，当行为主体的行为违反规定性规范时，他们往往会被视为更自由地做出了这些行为，更有意地采取了行动，对后续结果的造成因素更大，甚至幸福感更低。对这种效应的解释仍在争论中，一些研究人员诉诸违反规范行为的特征，而其他研究人员则强调行为主体行动时心理状态的重要性。在此，我们报告两项大规模实验的结果，这些实验重复并扩展了最初证明违反规范具有普遍影响的十二项研究。在每种情况下，我们都在现有的实验范式基础上，额外操纵行为主体是否知道他们正在违反规范，同时保持所采取的行动不变。我们发现了无知具有普遍影响的证据：违反规范对不规范判断的影响很大程度上取决于行为主体知道他们在行动时违反了规范。此外，我们发现证据表明，常态影响的降低是由人们的反事实推理支撑的：如果行为主体无知，人们就不太可能考虑行为主体行动的替代方案。我们将我们的发现置于围绕常态在人们推理中的作用的更广泛辩论中。
