Crime, punishment, and causation

The effect of etiological information on the perception of moral agency

Bibliographic Data

ID6110792
AuthorsPhilip Robbins (0000-0001-6355-7656, University of Missouri), Paul Litton (0000-0001-9418-0978, University of Missouri)
Year2018
Volume24
Issue1
Pages118-127
Publication date2018-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePsychology Public Policy and Law (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1076-8971 • E-ISSN: 1939-1528
PublisherAmerican Psychological Association (APA) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1037/law0000146
OpenAlexW2744614844
LanguageEN
Citations received10

Moral judgments about a situation are profoundly shaped by the perception of individuals in that situation as either moral agents or moral patients (Gray & Wegner, 2009; Gray, Young, & Waytz, 2012), Specifically, the more we see someone as a moral agent, the less we see them as a moral patient, and vice versa. As a result, casting the perpetrator of a transgression as a victim tends to have the effect of making them seem less blameworthy (Gray & Wegner, 201 1). Based on this theoretical framework, we predicted that criminal offenders with a mental disorder that predisposes them to antisocial behavior would be judged more negatively when the disorder is described as having a genetic origin than when it is described as environmentally caused, as in the case of childhood abuse or accident. Further, we predicted that some environmental explanations would mitigate attributions of blame more than others, namely, that offenders whose disorder was caused by childhood abuse (intentional harm) would be seen as less blameworthy than offenders whose disorder is caused by an unfortunate accident (unintentional harm). Results from two vignette-based studies designed to test these predictions, conducted with participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk (N = 244 and N = 387, respectively), confirmed the first prediction but not the second. Implications of this research for three areas-the psychology of moral judgment, philosophical debates about moral responsibility and determinism, and the practice of the law are discussed in the sequel

Causation · Criminology · Epistemology · Moral agency · Perception · Political science · Deception detection and forensic psychology · Free Will and Agency · Law · Neuroscience · Philosophy · Psychology · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment · Social Psychology

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