Small-scale societies exhibit fundamental variation in the role of intentions in moral judgment
- aDepartment of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1553;
- bCenter for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1553;
- cSocial Sciences Subdivision, College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, IL 60137-6599;
- dDepartment of Anthropology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, NV 89154-5003;
- ePhilosophy Department, John Carroll University, University Heights, OH 44118;
- fDepartment of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3210;
- gDepartment of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138;
- hDepartment of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada;
- iDepartment of Economics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada;
- jInstitute of Social Anthropology, Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences, Comenius University, 820 05 Bratislava 25, Slovakia;
- kSchool of Archaeology and Anthropology, The Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia;
- lDepartment of Philosophy, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1107;
- mCenter for Cognitive Science, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1107;
- nJepson School of Leadership Studies, University of Richmond, Richmond, VA 23173;
- oDepartment of Philosophy, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S3 7QB, United Kingdom;
- pHang Seng Centre for Cognitive Studies, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S3 7QB, United Kingdom
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Edited by Douglas L. Medin, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, and approved February 23, 2016 (received for review November 8, 2015)

Significance
It is widely considered a universal feature of human moral psychology that reasons for actions are taken into account in most moral judgments. However, most evidence for this moral intent hypothesis comes from large-scale industrialized societies. We used a standardized methodology to test the moral intent hypothesis across eight traditional small-scale societies (ranging from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist to horticulturalist) and two Western societies (one urban, one rural). The results show substantial variation in the degree to which an individual’s intentions influence moral judgments of his or her actions, with intentions in some cases playing no role at all. This dimension of cross-cultural variation in moral judgment may have important implications for understanding cultural disagreements over wrongdoing.
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.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: hclarkbarrett{at}gmail.com.
Author contributions: H.C.B., A.B., A.N.C., D.M.T.F., S.F., M.G., J.H., M.K., G.K., A.P., B.A.S., S.S., C.v.R., W.Z., and S.L. designed research; H.C.B., A.B., A.N.C., D.M.T.F., M.G., J.H., M.K., G.K., A.P., B.A.S., C.v.R., and W.Z. performed research; H.C.B. analyzed data; and H.C.B., J.H., and S.L. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
Data deposition: Data are permanently deposited on the data page of the AHRC Culture and the Mind Project, www.philosophy.dept.shef.ac.uk/culture&mind/Data/IntentionsMorality/IntentionsMorality.csv.
See Commentary on page 4555.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1522070113/-/DCSupplemental.
Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.
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