So, to begin with, it is not that clear what the article is really about.<\/p>\n
\n
- In your opinion, how good or bad was what [the agent] did?<\/li>\n
- When people discover what happened, what will people think of [the agent] \u2014 will they think he is a good person or a bad person?<\/li>\n
- In your opinion did [the agent do this] on purpose, or by accident?<\/li>\n
- In your opinion, do you think [Agent] should be rewarded or punished?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
I very much doubt that the relevant notions (“bad action,” “bad person,” “on purpose,” “reward” and “punishment”) are identical across cultures or close enough that people\u2019s response can be numerically compared. This is not discussed, nor is the way people in different cultures might have interpreted their task.<\/span><\/p>\n
Still, Hugo is impressed by the case of the Yasawans (Fiji islanders), who, it seems, \u201cjudge equally harshly a series of moral wrongdoings irrespective of whether they were committed intentionally or not\u201d. Well, as figure 3 shows, the Yasawa, quite unlike the other groups, tended to judge with the exact same mildness all actions presented, theft, food taboo violation, poisoning, bodily harm, whether they were done intentionally or not. Or maybe, more plausibly, they thought that answering in the same manner (by pointing to the middle of a horizontal five-points response scale) to all these questions was the right thing to do. How Yasawans and other participants might have understood the task and the proper way to perform it is not discussed.<\/p>\n
Still, the authors rightly note:<\/p>\n
Interestingly, Yasawa is a society in the Pacific culture area where mental opacity norms, which proscribe speculating about the reasons for others\u2019 behavior in some contexts, have been reported.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Such kind of relevant ethnographic observation should have been provided in much greater detail to help interpret not just the Yawasans responses, but all the experimental evidence presented. I have little doubt that the result of putting things in a rich enough ethnographic perspective would have, on the one hand, allowed fine-grained qualitative comparison and made the work much more interesting and, on the other hand, would have radically put into question the numerical comparability of the cases.<\/p>\n
Just as an anecdotal illustration, Joe Henrich<\/a> and his collaborators have published several articles on Yasawa culture and society that, unlike this one, combine ethnography and experiments in a useful and sometimes ground-breaking way. In Rita Anne McNamara, Ara Norenzayan & Joseph Henrich (2016) Supernatural punishment, in-group biases, and material insecurity: experiments and ethnography from Yasawa, Fiji (Religion,<\/em> Brain & Behavior<\/em>, 6:1, 34-55) in particular, there is, in passing, the following observation:<\/p>\n
\n[1] Barrett, H. C., Bolyanatz, A., Crittenden, A. N., Fessler, D. M., Fitzpatrick, S., Gurven, M., … & Laurence, S. (2016). Small-scale societies exhibit fundamental variation in the role of intentions in moral judgment.\u00a0Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/i>,\u00a0113<\/i>(17), 4688-4693.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In his latest blog post, Hugo Mercier, discusses\u00a0Clark Barrett et al.\u2019s paper in PNAS: \u201cSmall-scale societies exhibit fundamental variation in the role of intentions in moral judgment.\u201d [\u00b41] Unlike Hugo, I don\u2019t find this piece of work fascinating. In fact, given that excellent scholars I respect and admire have invested a good amount of effort […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":677,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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