{"pk":26357,"title":"Implicit measurement of motivated causal attribution","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Moral judgment often involves pinning causation for harm toa particular person. Since it reveals “who one sides with”, ex-pression of moral judgment can be a costly social act that peo-ple may be motivated to conceal. Here, we demonstrate thata simple, well-studied psycholinguistic task (implicit causal-ity) can be leveraged as a novel implicit measure of morallyrelevant causal attributions. Participants decided whether tocontinue sentences like “Amy killed Bob because...” with ei-ther the pronoun he or she. We found that (1) implicit causal-ity selections predicted explicit causal judgments, (2) select-ing the object (victim) for harm/force events (e.g., kill, rape)predicted endorsement of moral values previously linked tovictim-blame, and (3) higher hostile sexism predicted select-ing the female as the cause in male-on-female harm/force. Theimplicit causality task is a new measure of morally motivatedcausal attribution that may circumvent social desirability con-cerns.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"implicit cognition; causation; psycholinguistics;moral psychology; implicit causality; semantics"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/20d9h3rx","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Laura","middle_name":"","last_name":"Niemi","name_suffix":"","institution":"Harvard University","department":""},{"first_name":"Joshua","middle_name":"","last_name":"Hartshorne","name_suffix":"","institution":"Massachusetts Institute of Technology","department":""},{"first_name":"Tobias","middle_name":"","last_name":"Gerstenberg","name_suffix":"","institution":"Massachusetts Institute of Technology","department":""},{"first_name":"Liane","middle_name":"","last_name":"Young","name_suffix":"","institution":"Boston College","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2016-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26357/galley/15993/download/"}]}