how does wisdom contribute to moral judgment

Details

Supervisors

Samson, Dana

Faculty

Faculté de psychologie, logopédie, sexologie et des sciences de la famille

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences psychologiques, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

enWisdom is commonly described as the capacity to intellectual humility, consider different perspectives, integrate complex and sometimes conflicting information, and reach balanced judgments (Sternberg, 1998; Takahashi, 2000; Ardelt, 2003, 2004; Grossman, 2017, 2021). Moral judgment offers a natural testing ground for this claim, because it requires integrating multiple, sometimes conflicting sources of information about an agent's action, outcome, intention, and underlying motive (Carlson, 2022; Glück & Weststrate, 2022). The present study examined whether trait wisdom, measured with Ardelt's (2003) Three-Dimensional Wisdom Scale (3D-WS), moderates how strongly people rely on intention, motive, and outcome when assigning punishment. Fifty young adults judged 24 moral vignettes, adapted from the paradigm of Leloup et al. (2018), that fully crossed Intention (harmful vs. neutral), Motive (self-oriented vs. other-oriented), and Outcome (harmful vs. neutral) in a 2 × 2 × 2 design. Punishment ratings (0–6) were analysed with a linear mixed-effects model with crossed random effects for participants and scenarios. Intention, Motive, and Outcome each exerted an independent effect on punishment, but their effects were partly non-additive. A Motive × Intention interaction showed that harmful intent led to more severe punishment when the agent also acted out of self-interest. An Intention × Outcome interaction replicated previous findings (Leloup et al., 2018): harmful intent combined with a harmful outcome elicited the most severe punishment, whereas the absence of harmful intent reduced punishment even when the outcome was harmful. At the same time, harmful intent continued to attract substantial punishment when the outcome was neutral. Trait wisdom did not affect punishment on average, nor did it interact with any single moral component in isolation; however, a significant Intention × Outcome × Wisdom interaction showed that, particularly in the attempted-harm condition (harmful intention, neutral outcome), higher wisdom was associated with a steeper increase in punishment, whereas the association was flat or slightly negative in the three other conditions. These findings suggest that wisdom may not uniformly influence moral judgment but may instead be associated with how people integrate specific