The temporal dynamics of third-party moral judgment of harm transgressions: answers from a 2-response paradigm

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 were presented with moral scenarios twice: they had to provide their first judgment about an agent under both time pressure and interfering load, and were then asked to respond a second time at their own pace. In Experiment 1, participants were harsher toward a malevolent agent at the second response, 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. Participants were not only harsher toward intentional transgressors at the second response, but they were also less harsh toward accidental transgressors at the second response. 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 process.

Keywords:

• Moral judgment
• reasoning
• accidental harm
• dual process

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Open science practices

The preregistrations are available at the following links:

Experiment 1: https://osf.io/cyq7x/?view_only=131f557decc94bbbac56513ca69779f5

Experiment 2: https://osf.io/w329f/?view_only=c3e26a9b49a54e9180490a25a5bd7280

The data and analysis scripts are available at the following link: https://osf.io/khgja/

Notes

1 The effect size measure associated with the MANOVAs in the results section is Pillai’s trace that ranges from 0 to 1. The closer to 1, the greater the effect of a given factor on the dependent variables. A small, medium and large effect size measured with this indicator would be equivalent to 0.01, 0.06 and 0.20, respectively.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant from Agence Nationale de la Recherche to Bastien Trémolière (ANR-19-CE28-0002). The funding source had no role in the study.