Apologies often march hand-in-hand with a claim about intent—"But I didn't mean it like that!" Even our legal systems recognize this idea. We differentiate between accidentally killing a person (manslaughter) and intentional, planned killing (first-degree murder). The intent of a person clearly matters in how we assess their offenses. And if someone means to do something wrong, it’s judged more harshly when it’s not just an accident, even if the outcome is identical.

Some researchers who study human systems of morality think that the importance of moral intent might even be a universal across all human societies. We have reams of evidence showing that people take intent seriously when they’re weighing up moral transgressions: psychological experiments, brain imaging, and even surveys of legal systems. But most of this evidence comes from what researchers call WEIRD societies: Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic.

It’s not really possible to make claims about features that are universal to all humans unless we study a representative sample of humans. Perhaps something about living in large industrial societies, with their education systems and distribution of resources, leads to us WEIRDos to think about moral intent in a particular way. And because these societies interact a lot, ideas can easily spread between them.

To test the claims of universality, a team of researchers set out to explore how a huge range of societies views the importance of moral intent. They found that it played some kind of role for everyone they studied but that there was still a lot of variation among societies.

But he meant well

The researchers studied 10 different societies on six continents. Some of them were hunter-gatherers, others were farmers, and still others had some combination of features, like hunting and small-scale farming, or fishing and farming. Two of the societies were Western: one from WEIRD Los Angeles and the other from traditional rural Storozhnitsa, Ukraine.

In each society, people were asked to respond to little stories (vignettes) that depicted wrongdoing. The stories fell into different categories of forbidden actions: some were about physical violence, some were about group harm (like poisoning a village), some were about theft, and others were about “purity” beliefs, focusing on food taboos (for example, not eating cats).

Each action that was described could be depicted as either intentional (like stealing someone’s bag) or accidental (like mistaking another person’s bag for your own). It could also be depicted as something the person had an incentive to do (like seeing something valuable in the bag) or something the person would want to avoid doing (like the bag belonging to someone they wanted to impress).

Each participant in the study was given four of the vignettes and asked to make a series of judgments about the people in the stories. On a scale from one to five, they had to judge how bad the act was and whether the person in the story should be punished (severely or lightly) or rewarded for their actions. They were also asked whether the person in the story would have a good or bad reputation in light of their actions.

The researchers found that actions with “high intent” (those that a character in a story did intentionally, or that they had incentive to do) were rated as worse, deserving of more severe punishment and producing a worse reputation.

But there were large differences across societies. People in Los Angeles judged actions with high intent much more severely than actions with low intent; people in Storozhnitsa even more so. On the other end of the scale, Yasawa fishing communities in Fiji showed a much smaller difference between high-intent and low-intent actions, as did Himba herders from Namibia.

There were also differences in how much intent made a difference for various kinds of offenses. If story characters didn’t mean to break a food taboo, people didn’t care very much; breaking the food taboo was pretty much always bad whether or not they meant to. On the other hand, intent played a large role in judgments of theft. If a story character stole property accidentally, it made a large difference in how harshly they were judged.

Finally, societies varied widely in what they considered a reasonable excuse for a character’s actions. Across the vignettes, characters sometimes did something wrong out of necessity, self-defense, insanity, or because of a mistake or differing moral beliefs. Most societies had limited tolerance for someone having different moral beliefs and high tolerance for actions committed in self-defense, but other excuses showed more variation. For instance, the Storozhnitsa were very lenient when given an insanity defense, but the Yasawa didn’t think it really helped excuse an action.

Universal but different

The results paint a complicated picture for the question of universality. All the societies seemed to use a character’s intentions in some way when they were judging how bad their actions were. However, some societies thought intent was incredibly important while others only nudged their judgments slightly in response to a change in intent.

If we think of a universal behavior as something that shows up in an identical way in every society, the results from this experiment suggest that views on intent aren't universal. However, there’s a more flexible way of thinking about universality. “Intentions and other reasons for action play some role in moral psychology in all societies, although that role might vary by society and by context,” the researchers write. This version of universality is very much supported by the data.

Jared Piazza, who studies the psychology of morality, points out that people across different societies might have had different interpretations of the stories. The participants were asked some questions to check their interpretations of the tales, and this showed that societies also had differences in how much they thought the characters were acting intentionally. So it could be that some people didn’t think a character’s actions were unintentional, and not that they think intentional and unintentional actions are equally bad. “It is possible that the variation is largely accounted for by differences in how members of different groups interpreted the stimuli,” he told Ars.

The study is still a vital step in testing claims about universal moral norms. “Cross-cultural work, particularly in small-scale, non-WEIRD societies” is essential for studying human universals, the authors write. It will help us figure out just how weird Western societies are, and to understand how much we can extrapolate based on just a small section of human experience.

PNAS, 2016. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1522070113 (About DOIs).