The Plasticity of Harm in the Service of Punishment Goals: Legal Implications of Outcome-Driven Reasoning

Sood, Avani Mehta; Darley, John M.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.1641022

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Of importance, perceived harm is unlikely to be the product of effort ful rationalization, as revealed by the time pressure manipulation (Study 1), implicit social cognition studies (Studies 2 and 3), unrelated judgments of injuries (Study 4), and perceptions of children's suffering (Study 5). Of course, effortful rationalizations exist and often do focus upon issues of harm (Haidt & Hersh, 2001;Sood & Darley, 2007), but we suggest that these justifica tions build off of initial and automatic perceptions. Analogously, moral judgments can also involve explicit reasoning (Mercier, 2011;Mercier & Sperber, 2011;Pizarro & Bloom, 2003), but this does not rule out the importance-or psychological persis tence-of intuitive perceptions of right or wrong.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 85%

The myth of harmless wrongs in moral cognition: Automatic dyadic completion from sin to suffering.

Gray¹,

Schein²,

Ward³

2014

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

248

294

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When something is wrong, someone is harmed. This hypothesis derives from the theory of dyadic morality, which suggests a moral cognitive template of wrongdoing agent and suffering patient (i.e., victim). This dyadic template means that victimless wrongs (e.g., masturbation) are psychologically incomplete, compelling the mind to perceive victims even when they are objectively absent. Five studies reveal that dyadic completion occurs automatically and implicitly: Ostensibly harmless wrongs are perceived to have victims (Study 1), activate concepts of harm (Studies 2 and 3), and increase perceptions of suffering (Studies 4 and 5). These results suggest that perceiving harm in immorality is intuitive and does not require effortful rationalization. This interpretation argues against both standard interpretations of moral dumbfounding and domain-specific theories of morality that assume the psychological existence of harmless wrongs. Dyadic completion also suggests that moral dilemmas in which wrongness (deontology) and harm (utilitarianism) conflict are unrepresentative of typical moral cognition.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 85%

The myth of harmless wrongs in moral cognition: Automatic dyadic completion from sin to suffering.

Gray¹,

Schein²,

Ward³

2014

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

248

294

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…These perceptions of harm are not just post hoc rhetoric, as people see suffering in the faces of children milliseconds after being primed with ostensibly harmless moral violations (e.g., masturbation; Gray et al, 2014). Certainly people can reason about harm after the fact, and do use the rhetoric of harm to convince others (Kahan, 2007; Sood & Darley, 2007), but this deliberative reasoning likely stems from intuitive and automatic perceptions of harm (Kruglanski & Gigerenzer, 2011). At the very least, it is a logical fallacy to conclude that, because perceptions of harm can be used in reasoning, all harm is necessarily reasoned.…”

Section: Dyadic Moralitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Harm mediates the disgust-immorality link.

Schein¹,

Ritter²,

Gray³

2016

Emotion

101

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Many acts are disgusting, but only some of these acts are immoral. Dyadic morality predicts that disgusting acts should be judged as immoral to the extent that they seem harmful. Consistent with this prediction, 3 studies reveal that perceived harm mediates the link between feelings of disgust and moral condemnation-even for ostensibly harmless "purity" violations. In many cases, accounting for perceived harm completely eliminates the link between disgust and moral condemnation. Analyses also reveal the predictive power of anger and typicality/weirdness in moral judgments of disgusting acts. The mediation of disgust by harm holds across diverse acts including gay marriage, sex acts, and religious blasphemy. Revealing the endogenous presence and moral relevance of harm within disgusting-but-ostensibly harmless acts argues against modular accounts of moral cognition such as moral foundations theory. Instead, these data support pluralistic conceptions of harm and constructionist accounts of morality and emotion. Implications for moral cognition and the concept of "purity" are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

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The Plasticity of Harm in the Service of Punishment Goals: Legal Implications of Outcome-Driven Reasoning

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

The myth of harmless wrongs in moral cognition: Automatic dyadic completion from sin to suffering.

The myth of harmless wrongs in moral cognition: Automatic dyadic completion from sin to suffering.

Harm mediates the disgust-immorality link.

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