TY - GEN
T1 - Expectations bias judgments of harm against others
AU - Powell, Derek
AU - Horne, Zachary
N1 - Funding Information:
We would like to acknowledge the help of Keith Holyoak, Alan Fiske, Matthew Lieberman, Hongjing Lu, John Hummel, and Ellen Markman for their comments and support for the project.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2018. All rights reserved.
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - People's expectations play an important role in their evaluations and reactions to events. There is often disappointment when events fail to meet expectations-sometimes even when the events are still positive overall-and there is a special thrill to having one's expectations exceeded. In four studies, we examined how expectations influence people's judgments of events where another person or people were harmed. Participants judged pairs of events where a victim experienced a similar harm, but where victims were at different prior risk of being harmed. We found that people judged these events as being worse when they were less expected-that is, when the victims were initially at lower risk of being harmed. We argue that this bias has pernicious moral consequences.
AB - People's expectations play an important role in their evaluations and reactions to events. There is often disappointment when events fail to meet expectations-sometimes even when the events are still positive overall-and there is a special thrill to having one's expectations exceeded. In four studies, we examined how expectations influence people's judgments of events where another person or people were harmed. Participants judged pairs of events where a victim experienced a similar harm, but where victims were at different prior risk of being harmed. We found that people judged these events as being worse when they were less expected-that is, when the victims were initially at lower risk of being harmed. We argue that this bias has pernicious moral consequences.
KW - Bias
KW - Judgment and decision-making
KW - Moral judgments
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M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85139548197
T3 - Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2018
SP - 2273
EP - 2278
BT - Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2018
PB - The Cognitive Science Society
T2 - 40th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Changing Minds, CogSci 2018
Y2 - 25 July 2018 through 28 July 2018
ER -