Sense of agency predicts severity of moral judgments

Abstract

Sense of Agency (SoA) refers to the awareness of being the agent of our own actions. A key feature of SoA relies on the perceived temporal compression between our own actions and their sensory consequences, a phenomenon known as “Intentional Binding.” Prior studies have linked SoA to the sense of responsibility for our own actions. However, it is unclear whether SoA predicts the way we judge the actions of others – including judgments of morally wrong actions like harming others. To address this issue, we ran an on-line pilot experiment where participants underwent two different tasks designed to tap into SoA and moral cognition. SoA was measured using the Intentional Binding task which allowed us to obtain both implicit (Intentional Binding) and explicit (Agency Rating) measures of SoA. Moral cognition was assessed by asking the same participants to evaluate videoclips where an agent could deliberately or inadvertently cause suffering to a victim (Intentional vs. Accidental Harm) compared with Neutral scenarios. Results showed a significant relation between both implicit and explicit measures of SoA and moral evaluation of the Accidental Harm scenarios, with stronger SoA predicting stricter moral judgments. These findings suggest that our capacity to feel in control of our actions predicts the way we judge others’ actions, with stronger feelings of responsibility over our own actions predicting the severity of our moral evaluations of other actions. This was particularly true in ambiguous scenarios characterized by an incongruency between an apparently innocent intention and a negative action outcome.