The ontogeny of intent‐based normative judgments

Proft, Marina; Rakoczy, Hannes

doi:10.1111/desc.12728

Cited by 16 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…It has indeed been found that even infants hold sociomoral expectations and express intuitive preferences that take into account agents' intentions and prioritize them over actions' outcomes (Dunfield & Kuhlmeier, 2010;Hamlin, 2013;Hamlin, Ullman, Tenenbaum, Goodman, & Baker, 2013;Strid & Meristo, 2020;Woo, Steckler, Le, & Hamlin, 2017). Furthermore, we know that at least by five years of age, children consistently weigh intentions more than outcomes when they are asked to express a moral judgment in tasks that are more demanding compared to those employed with infants (Cushman, Sheketoff, Wharton, & Carey, 2013;Margoni & Surian, 2017Proft & Rakoczy, 2018; see Margoni & Surian, 2016 for a review).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Judging accidental harm: Due care and foreseeability of side effects

Margoni

Surian

2021

Curr Psychol

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Both in philosophy and in cognitive psychology, models of moral judgment posit that individuals take into account both agents’ intentions and actions’ outcomes. The present research focused on a third crucial piece of information, agents’ negligence. In Study 1, participants judged the moral wrongness and punishability of agents’ actions that resulted in negative side effects. In the scenarios, we orthogonally manipulated whether the agent acted with or without due care and whether she had or did not have information to foresee the negative side effects of her actions. Participants judged careless agents more condemnable than careful agents, especially when negative side effects could have been easily foreseen. In Study 2, we manipulated due care in acting in cases where the agent’s primary intention was to bring about a certain outcome without knowing that such outcome would actually be harmful. Here information about the foreseeability of negative outcomes was not provided, and participants judged actions performed with care more wrong and punishable than actions performed without care. This suggests that sometimes acting carefully and nevertheless causing harm may constitute evidence of the presence of negative intentions in the agents or evidence of the fact that agents indeed could have foreseen the negative effects of their actions. Together, these findings indicate that carefulness in acting and foreseeability are highly intertwined in moral judgment, and highlight the need to improve existing processing models of moral judgment to account for people’s evaluation of agents and actions whenever negligence can be attributed.

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confidence: 99%

Judging accidental harm: Due care and foreseeability of side effects

Margoni

Surian

2021

Curr Psychol

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“…A simpler version, perhaps based on donating stickers (cf. Proft & Rakoczy, 2019), could be useful in order to explore children's use of behavioral punishment for moral transgressions. 3…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Younger children who didn't pass a traditional ToM task attributed negative intentions to an accidental transgressor (the agent who unwittingly changed the object's location), giving more weight to the outcomes of the action than to the agent's mental states, and finding it difficult to identify a false belief when it led to a moral violation (cf. Proft & Rakoczy, 2019). However, 7-8 years olds who passed ToM tasks could attribute positive intentions to actions despite them having bad outcomes, and were more punitive with intentional transgressors.…”

Section: Investigations Of the Relationship Between Mental State Compmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The role of mental states in moral judgments and punishment behavior is probably sensitive to both the kind of transgression and the kind of mental states involved, as mental states seem more important when children evaluate moral compared to conventional violations, and intentions also seem to be more important than beliefs (Proft & Rakoczy, 2019). Moreover, just as there are cultural differences in the moral seriousness ascribed to conventional violations that involve no intent to harm others (Haidt, 2001), there are cultural differences in the roles that mental states play in moral judgments and in the rules that different groups follow to make judgments according to outcomes or intentions (Barrett et al, 2016;McNamara, Willard, Norenzayan, & Henrich, 2019).…”

Section: Investigations Of the Relationship Between Mental State Compmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Children consider both outcome and intent in moral judgements, punishment recommendations, and reward allocations

Ingram¹,

Co²

2019

Preprint

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In early-to-middle childhood children are thought to move from judging actions based solely on outcomes to also taking actors’ intentions into account. There is little research on how particular cognitive capabilities contribute to this breakthrough, or whether it occurs in children outside Europe and North America. We addressed both issues in a study of 174 children (94 girls, 80 boys), aged between 3-4, 5-6 and 7-8 years old, from low-income backgrounds in Bogotá, Colombia. Participants were presented with 4 vignettes in which an action’s outcome and the agent’s intention were systematically varied. Children were asked how good/bad each agent was, how much punishment they deserved, and how many reward points (linked to prizes) they would receive. They also completed a standard false-belief task. Both outcome and intention affected decisions in all 3 age groups, and indeed there was a much stronger effect of intention on all three measures. There was evidence of an outcome-to-intent shift only in behavioral rewards: 3–4 and 5–6-year-old children treated accidental transgressions as equivalent to intentional transgressions or failed attempts to do harm, while 7–8-year-old children assigned more points to accidental than intentional transgressors. Performance on the false-belief task was linked more with abstract judgements than with behavioral rewards. These results add to evidence that even young children consider agents’ intentions when making moral judgements. However, outcomes also mattered for all age groups, since accidents were never judged to be as acceptable as actions with both positive outcomes and positive intentions.

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“…It has indeed found that even infants hold sociomoral expectations that take into account agents' intentions and prioritize them over actions' outcomes (Dunfield & Kuhlmeier, 2010;Hamlin, 2013;Hamlin et al, 2013;Woo et al, 2017). Furthermore, we know that at least by five years of age, children consistently weigh intentions more than outcomes when they are asked explicitly to express a moral judgment (Cushman et al, 2013;Margoni & Surian, 2017Proft & Rakoczy, 2018;see Margoni & Surian, 2016…”

Section: Judging Accidental Harm: Due Care and Foreseeability Of Sidementioning

confidence: 99%

Judging Accidental Harm: Due Care and Foreseeability of Side Effects

Margoni¹,

Surian²

2020

Preprint

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Both in philosophy and in cognitive psychology, models of moral judgment predict that individuals take into account both agents’ intentions and actions’ outcomes. The present research focused on a third crucial piece of information, agents’ negligence. In Study 1, participants judged the moral wrongness and punishability of agents’ unintended actions that resulted in negative side effects. Whether the agent acted with or without due care and whether she had or did not have information to foresee the negative side effects of her action were manipulated orthogonally in the scenarios. We found that careless agents were condemned more than careful agents, especially when negative side effects could have been prevented. In Study 2, we manipulated due care in acting in non-paradigmatic cases where the agents’ primary intention was to bring about the outcome although not knowing that such outcome was actually negative for others. Here participants judged actions performed with care more wrong and punishable than actions performed without caring, suggesting that the absence of negligence was taken as evidence of the presence of a negative intention in the agents. Together, these findings highlight the need to improve existing processing models of moral judgment to account for people’s evaluation of agents’ intentions and actions’ outcomes in all those cases in which negligence can be attributed.

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The ontogeny of intent‐based normative judgments

Cited by 16 publications

References 51 publications

Judging accidental harm: Due care and foreseeability of side effects

Judging accidental harm: Due care and foreseeability of side effects

Children consider both outcome and intent in moral judgements, punishment recommendations, and reward allocations

Judging Accidental Harm: Due Care and Foreseeability of Side Effects

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