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{
    "pk": 25470,
    "title": "Behaviorist Thinking in Judgments of Wrongness, Punishment, and Blame",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "Moral judgment depends upon inferences about agents’\nbeliefs, desires, and intentions. Here, we argue that in\naddition to these factors, people take into account the moral\noptimality of an action. Three experiments show that even\nagents who are ignorant about the nature of their moral\ndecisions are held accountable for the quality of their\ndecision—a kind of behaviorist thinking, in that such\nreasoning bypasses the agent’s mental states. In particular,\nwhereas optimal choices are seen as more praiseworthy\nthan suboptimal choices, decision quality has no further\neffect on moral judgments—a highly suboptimal choice is\nseen as no worse than a marginally suboptimal choice.\nThese effects held up for judgments of wrongness and\npunishment (Experiment 1), positive and negative\noutcomes (Experiment 2), and agents with positive and\nnegative intentions (Experiment 3). We argue that these\nresults reflect a broader tendency to irresistibly apply the\nEfficiency Principle when explaining behavior",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "Moral judgment; theory of mind; causal\nreasoning; intentionality; lay decision theory"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Papers",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9bg708v3",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Julian",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "de Freitas",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford University",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Samuel",
            "middle_name": "G.B.",
            "last_name": "Johnson",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Department of Psychology, Yale University",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2015-01-01T18:00:00Z",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/25470/galley/15094/download/"
        }
    ]
}