Small-scale Societies Exhibit Fundamental Variation in the Role of Intentions in Moral Judgment

Authors

H. C. Barrett, University of California, Los Angeles
A Bolyanatz, College of DuPage
Alyssa Crittenden, University of Nevada, Las VegasFollow
D. M.T. Fessler, University of California, Los Angeles
S. Fitzpatrick, John Carroll University
M. Gurven, University of California, Santa Barbara
J. Henrich, University of British Columbia
M. Kanovsky, Comenius University
G. Kushnick, Australian National University
A. Pisor, University of California, Santa Barbara
B. A. Scelza, University of California, Los Angeles
S. Stich, Rutgers University
C. Von Rueden, University of Richmond
W. Zhao, University of British Columbia
S. Laurence, University of Sheffield

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2016

Publication Title

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

Volume

113

Issue

17

First page number:

4688

Last page number:

4693

Abstract

Intent and mitigating circumstances play a central role in moral and legal assessments in large-scale industrialized societies. Although these features of moral assessment are widely assumed to be universal, to date, they have only been studied in a narrow range of societies. We show that there is substantial cross-cultural variation among eight traditional small-scale societies (ranging from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist to horticulturalist) and two Western societies (one urban, one rural) in the extent to which intent and mitigating circumstances influence moral judgments. Although participants in all societies took such factors into account to some degree, they did so to very different extents, varying in both the types of considerations taken into account and the types of violations to which such considerations were applied. The particular patterns of assessment characteristic of large-scale industrialized societies may thus reflect relatively recently culturally evolved norms rather than inherent features of human moral judgment.

Keywords

Cognition; Culture; Human universals; Intentions; Morality

Language

English

Repository Citation

Barrett, H. C., Bolyanatz, A., Crittenden, A., Fessler, D. M., Fitzpatrick, S., Gurven, M., Henrich, J., Kanovsky, M., Kushnick, G., Pisor, A., Scelza, B. A., Stich, S., Von Rueden, C., Zhao, W., Laurence, S. (2016). Small-scale Societies Exhibit Fundamental Variation in the Role of Intentions in Moral Judgment. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 113(17), 4688-4693.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1522070113