A Double-Edged Sword: When Motive and Ambiguity Flip Moral Judgments

Moral judgments are central to social interactions but are often made in uncertain conditions — we may not know who did what and why they did what they did. When something bad goes down, we often want to know what motivated the crime. Interestingly, we hypothesize that knowing a potential transgressor's motive can make a perpetrator look more guilty in some situations but less guilty in others. This study investigates how the same motive, acting like a "double-edged sword," exacts distinct moral judgments on the same harmful behavior depending on the ambiguity of the actor's intentions. We report two studies, in which participants were asked to offer moral judgments under the manipulation of both the ambiguity of the actor's intention (ambiguous vs. unambiguous) and the presence of an other-oriented motive (motivated vs. unmotivated). In both studies, we found significant interaction effects between intentionality ambiguity and motivation, suggesting that the influence of motivation on moral judgments depends on whether the intention behind the action is clear or ambiguous. Consistent with our hypothesis, in Study 1B (N = 378), we found that participants' knowledge of a discernible motive increased moral condemnation when intentionality was ambiguous but decreased moral condemnation when intentionality was unambiguous. These findings offer profound insights into the complexity of moral reasoning, particularly in contexts where there is high uncertainty in attributing intention and motivation based on the actor's internal mental states.