Need For Cognition And Need For Closure: Two Potential Moderators Of Systematic Blame Updating

ASU Author/Contributor (non-ASU co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
Andrew M. Taylor (Creator)
Institution
Appalachian State University (ASU )
Web Site: https://library.appstate.edu/
Advisor
Andrew Smith

Abstract: How people make and modify moral judgments of blame has been hotly debated. The prevailing view for the past 20 years is that moral judgments of blame are generally biased by intuitive punitive motivations. However, recent work by Monroe and Malle (2019) demonstrates that although bias occurs in the context of intergroup blaming, people’s typical moral judgments of blame are highly responsive to evidence and relatively evenhanded. This study examined whether individual differences in need for cognition (Cacioppo, Petty, & Kao, 1982; Cacioppo & Petty, 1984) and need for closure (Crowson, 2013; Roets & Van Hiel, 2011) moderate how people update their moral judgments of blame. Following past work in non-moral decision making, I predicted that higher need for cognition and lower need for closure would be related to more updating for blame scenarios where an offense occurred for morally good, morally bad, intentional, unintentional, preventable, and unpreventable reasons. Overall, need for cognition and need for closure did not predict blame updating for morally good and bad scenarios or for preventable and unpreventable scenarios.However, there were interactions between blame updating and the intentionality of the offense. My results suggest that people do update their blame judgments and, in some specific situations, blame updating might be related to need for cognition and need for closure.

Additional Information

Publication
Thesis
Taylor, A. (2022). Need For Cognition And Need For Closure: Two Potential Moderators Of Systematic Blame Updating. Unpublished Master’s Thesis. Appalachian State University, Boone, NC.
Language: English
Date: 2022
Keywords
Blame, Blame Updating, Need for Cognition, Need for Closure

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