Experiment 2 - Job Status

🧠 Background

  • Earlier studies often used neutral or powerful characters.
  • This experiment asked whether the status of a person’s job role would influence judgements of intention and responsibility.

🧪 Method

  • Participants: 100 people.
  • Each read stories where the main character’s job was described as either high-status or low-status.
  • They then rated how intentional the side-effect seemed and how much responsibility they felt the character deserved.

📊 Findings

  • No significant difference was found between high-status and low-status roles.
  • Job role did not appear to change how people judged intention or responsibility.

💬 Summary

People’s judgements of intention and responsibility seemed unaffected by the social status of the character’s job. This suggested that job hierarchy alone does not shape moral judgements in this context.

Open Science Framework

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Analysis

To read through the analysis and results:

For reproducibility, you can rerun the analysis using the R Markdown file: