Varieties of Negligence

Negligence is often conceptualized as a failure of thought, yet social evaluations of negligence depend on how those failures occur. We present a unified framework predicting variation along three axes: whether the agent lacked diligence, whether the agent made a perceptual or mnemonic error, and whether the agent was factually or normatively ignorant with respect to their wrongdoing. Across four pre-registered experiments (N = 2,727), negligence type affected moral judgment. Process and diligence information differentially influenced blame, wrongness, and accidentality judgments. Using a judgment-updating paradigm, negligence information globally reduced perceived intentionality while selectively increasing blame for certain forms of negligence. Finally, we identified relevant priming effects: emphasizing ease of avoidance increased sanctions, whereas self-projection cues attenuated sanctions. Our results integrate across different lines of research on negligence and specify what factors are associated with different evaluations. We also identify policy-relevant considerations for jury instructions and sentencing for negligence. Participants were recruited through Academic Prolific and were restricted to being located in the United States. Thus, our results are limited in terms of drawing exclusively from people in the United States with Internet access. This presents an important constraint on generalizability. We measured attitudes and judgments through self-report across all studies.