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

DOI

10.1073/pnas.1522070113

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.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-26-2016

Comments

Refer to Dr. Christopher von Rueden's website for further information.

Publisher Statement

Copyright © 2016 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. This article first appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113:17 (2016), 4688-4693.

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