In Studies 2a And 2b
Study 3
In Studies 2a and 2b there appeared to be differences between disease/disorder conceptualizations and those implying reduced agency or reduced capacity to make the right choice. However, due to the sequential nature of Studies 2a and 2b, and the fact that respondents were asked to explicitly endorse a given conceptualization, we do not know whether it is easy to manipulate people's conceptualizations of responsibility in such a way that it affects judgments about moral responsibility. For this reason, we employed a between-person experimental design in Study 3.
We had three main research questions. First, would a brain disease conceptualization, invoked by information about brain mechanisms involved in addiction, give different inferences regarding moral responsibility than a control condition with no information? Instead of asking people to accept certain views of addiction, we used the information about addiction as a brain disease as a persuasive message and asked for the respondents' own opinions ("Please give your true opinion when answering the two questions below. There is no right or wrong answers"). …show more content…
This was suggested by the results from Study 2b showing that judgments of addictive actions gave higher levels of moral responsibility than addiction as a state, even when asked to accept a mechanistic model. But could we obtain similar effects when merely adding information about concrete action (while controlling for the object of evaluation)? In addiction to the Control condition and the Brain Disease condition, this gave a Brain Disease + Agency
In Studies 2a and 2b there appeared to be differences between disease/disorder conceptualizations and those implying reduced agency or reduced capacity to make the right choice. However, due to the sequential nature of Studies 2a and 2b, and the fact that respondents were asked to explicitly endorse a given conceptualization, we do not know whether it is easy to manipulate people's conceptualizations of responsibility in such a way that it affects judgments about moral responsibility. For this reason, we employed a between-person experimental design in Study 3.
We had three main research questions. First, would a brain disease conceptualization, invoked by information about brain mechanisms involved in addiction, give different inferences regarding moral responsibility than a control condition with no information? Instead of asking people to accept certain views of addiction, we used the information about addiction as a brain disease as a persuasive message and asked for the respondents' own opinions ("Please give your true opinion when answering the two questions below. There is no right or wrong answers"). …show more content…
This was suggested by the results from Study 2b showing that judgments of addictive actions gave higher levels of moral responsibility than addiction as a state, even when asked to accept a mechanistic model. But could we obtain similar effects when merely adding information about concrete action (while controlling for the object of evaluation)? In addiction to the Control condition and the Brain Disease condition, this gave a Brain Disease + Agency