Unjustifiably Irresponsible: The Effects of Social Roles on Attributions of Intent.

Three preregistered, high-powered experiments using vignettes (N=788) examined how people’s social roles change others’ perceptions of their intentions to cause harm. Results are consistent with the Tradeoff Justification Model, which argues that people reasonably use social information about the actor’s willingness to unjustifiably cause harm to infer intentions: Harms were judged as unjustified and intentional when the person neglected a role responsibility to prevent the harm, but justified and unintentional when caused by fulfilling a role responsibility. Mediation analyses were consistent with roles influencing intention judgments via their effects on a person’s responsibilities and how this changes what people consider justified. Experiment 3 conceptually replicated the side-effect effect (Knobe, 2003), and found that changing roles eliminated the effect, suggesting that social information about justification may be responsible for it.