Abstract Decades of research conducted in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, & Democratic (WEIRD) societies have led many scholars to conclude that the use of mental states in moral judgment is a human cognitive universal, perhaps an adaptive strategy for selecting optimal social partners from a large pool of candidates. However, recent work from a more diverse array of societies suggests there may be important variation in how much people rely on mental states, with people in some societies judging accidental harms just as harshly as intentional ones. To explain this variation, we develop and test a novel cultural evolutionary theory proposing that the intensity of kin-based institutions will favor less attention to mental states when judging moral violations. First, to better illuminate the historical distribution of the use of intentions in moral judgment, we code and analyze anthropological observations from the Human Area Relations Files. This analysis shows that notions of strict liability—wherein the role for mental states is reduced—were common across diverse societies around the globe. Then, by expanding an existing vignette-based experimental dataset containing observations from 321 people in a diverse sample of 10 societies, we show that the intensity of a society's kin-based institutions can explain a substantial portion of the population-level variation in people's reliance on intentions in three different kinds of moral judgments. Together, these lines of evidence suggest that people's use of mental states has coevolved culturally to fit their local kin-based institutions. We suggest that although reliance on mental states has likely been a feature of moral judgment in human communities over historical and evolutionary time, the relational fluidity and weak kin ties of today's WEIRD societies position these populations' psychology at the extreme end of the global and historical spectrum.

中文翻译：

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亲属关系强度和心理状态在社会道德判断中的使用

摘要 在西方、受过教育、工业化、富裕和民主 (WEIRD) 社会进行的数十年研究使许多学者得出结论，在道德判断中使用心理状态是人类认知的普遍性，也许是选择最佳社会伙伴的适应性策略来自大量候选人。然而，最近来自更多样化社会的研究表明，人们对心理状态的依赖程度可能存在重要差异，在某些社会中，人们对意外伤害的判断与对有意伤害的判断一样严厉。为了解释这种变化，我们开发并测试了一种新的文化进化理论，该理论提出在判断道德违规时，基于亲属的制度的强度将有利于较少关注精神状态。第一的，为了更好地阐明在道德判断中使用意图的历史分布，我们对人类区域关系文件中的人类学观察进行了编码和分析。这一分析表明，严格责任的概念——其中精神状态的作用降低了——在全球不同的社会中都很普遍。然后，通过扩展现有的基于小插图的实验数据集，该数据集包含来自 10 个社会的不同样本中 321 人的观察结果，我们表明一个社会的亲属制度的强度可以解释人们依赖的人口水平变化的很大一部分关于三种不同道德判断中的意图。总之，这些证据表明人们对精神状态的使用已经在文化上共同进化以适应他们当地的亲属制度。