No abstract

Recent work supports the role of reasoning in third-party moral judgment of harm transgressions. The dynamics of the underlying cognitive processes supporting moral judgment is however poorly understood. In two preregistered experiments, we addressed this issue using a two-response paradigm. Participants addressed moral scenarios twice: a first time under both time pressure and interfering load, and a second time at their own pace with the opportunity to revise their judgment. In Experiment 1, participants revised their response differently depending on the perpetrator’s intention. They were harsher toward a malevolent agent after deliberation, assigning more moral wrongness and punishment to an agent who either attempted to harm or harmed intentionally. Experiment 2 replicated the effect of intention on response change in a paradigm contrasting accidental to intentional harm scenarios. Thinking about the transgression longer made participants not only harsher toward intentional transgressors, but also more forgiving of accidental transgressors. We discuss the possibility that decoding overall intent and assigning moral judgment based on the presence or absence of a malevolent intent may be a relatively costly cognitive process.