“I didn’t mean to” doesn’t count for much in some societies

"I had to! The bear attacked me first!" (credit: flickr user: Sheila Sund)

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.