Reasoning supports forgiving accidental harms

Abstract

People experience a strong conflict while evaluating actors who unintentionally harmed someone—her innocent intention exonerating her, while the harmful outcome incriminating her. Different people solve this conflict differently, suggesting the presence of dispositional moderators of the way the conflict is processed. In the present research, we explore how reasoning ability and cognitive style relate to how people choose to resolve this conflict and judge accidental harms. We conducted three studies in which we utilized varied reasoning measures and populations. The results showed that individual differences in reasoning ability and cognitive style predicted severity of judgments in fictitious accidental harms scenarios, with better reasoners being less harsh in their judgments. Internal meta-analysis confirmed that this effect was robust only for accidental harms. We discuss the importance of individual differences in reasoning ability in the assessment of accidental harms.