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How do people’s social roles change others’ perceptions of their intentions to cause harm? Three preregistered vignette-based experiments ( N = 788) manipulated the social role of someone causing harm and measured how intentional people thought the harm was. Results indicate that people judge harmful consequences as intentional when they think the actor unjustifiably caused harm. Social roles were shown to alter intention judgments by making people responsible for preventing harm (thereby rendering the harm as an intentional neglect of one’s responsibilities) or for causing the harm (thereby excusing it as an unintentional byproduct of the role). Additionally, Experiment 3 conceptually replicated and moderated the side-effect effect —revealing that people think harmful side effects are intentional when the harm is unjustified but not when a role’s responsibility justifies it. We discuss the importance of social information—including roles—in how people judge others’ intentions.

Three preregistered, high-powered experiments using vignettes (N=788) examined how people’s social roles change others’ perceptions of their intentions to cause harm. Results are consistent with the Tradeoff Justification Model, which argues that people reasonably use social information about the actor’s willingness to unjustifiably cause harm to infer intentions: Harms were judged as unjustified and intentional when the person neglected a role responsibility to prevent the harm, but justified and unintentional when caused by fulfilling a role responsibility. Mediation analyses were consistent with roles influencing intention judgments via their effects on a person’s responsibilities and how this changes what people consider justified. Experiment 3 conceptually replicated the side-effect effect (Knobe, 2003), and found that changing roles eliminated the effect, suggesting that social information about justification may be responsible for it.

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