Integration of intention and outcome in moral judgment

Abstract

This experiment studied how the intention of an actor affected moral judgment. Subjects received information about the intention of an actor, and about the value of the outcome of his action to a used as stimuli, and both gave similar results. The main data followed the parallelism prediction, evidence for the operation of some simple integration model. Auxiliary data provided a critical test that eliminated the adding rule and supported the averaging rule. These results suggest that previous work on the cognitive algebra of human judgment may generalize to the moral realm. These results also illustrate how information integration theory can provide a significant advance upon phenomenonological approaches to moral judgment such as have been used by Heider and Piaget.