No abstract

Most crimes in America require that the defendant have mens rea, Latin for "guilty mind." However, mens rea is not legally required for strict liability crimes, such as speeding, for which someone is guilty even if ignorant or deceived about her speed. In 3 experiments involving participants responding to descriptive vignettes, we investigated whether the division of strict liability crimes in the law reflects an aspect of laypeople's intuitive moral cognition. Experiment 1 (N = 396; 236 male, 159 female, 1 other; M = 30) found evidence that it does: ignorance and deception were less mitigating for strict liability crimes than for "mens rea" crimes. Experiments 2 (N = 413; 257 male, 154 female, 2 other; M = 31) and 3 (N = 404; 183 male, 221 female, M = 35) revealed that strict liability crimes are not treated as pure moral violations, but additionally as violations of convention. We found that for strict liability crimes, ratings of moral wrongness and punishment were influenced to a greater extent by the fact that a rule had been violated, even when harm was kept constant, mirroring the legal distinction of malum prohibitum (wrong as prohibited) versus malum in se (wrong in itself). Further, we found that rules prohibiting strict liability crimes were judged more arbitrary than corresponding rules for "mens rea" crimes, and that this judgment was related to the role of mental states. Jointly, the findings suggest a surprising correspondence between the law and laypeople's intuitive judgments. (PsycINFO Database Record

An actor's mental states-whether she acted knowingly and with bad intentions-typically play an important role in evaluating the extent to which an action is wrong and in determining appropriate levels of punishment. In four experiments, we find that this role for knowledge and intent is significantly weaker when evaluating transgressions of conventional rules as opposed to moral rules. We also find that this attenuated role for knowledge and intent is partly due to the fact that conventional rules are judged to be more arbitrary than moral rules; whereas moral transgressions are associated with actions that are intrinsically wrong (e.g., hitting another person), conventional transgressions are associated with actions that are only contingently wrong (e.g., wearing pajamas to school, which is only wrong if it violates a dress code that could have been otherwise). Finally, we find that it is the perpetrator's belief about the arbitrary or non-arbitrary basis of the rule-not the reality-that drives this differential effect of knowledge and intent across types of transgressions.

Some actions are both legally and morally blameworthy, some are neither, and still others are one but not the other. One factor that separates actions into these categories is the actor’s mental states: what she knew, intended, foresaw, and so on. Most criminal statutes in the United States place some requirement on the mental states of the accused, from intent at the high end to negligence at the low end. This requirement is referred to as mens rea—Latin for ‘guilty mind’. This chapter explores what legal and moral judgments reveal about the role of mens rea. We review empirical work from moral psychology, with an eye towards normative implications for moral judgment.