How do people’s social roles change others’ perceptions of their intentions to cause harm? Three preregistered vignette-based experiments (N = 788) manipulated the social role of someone causing harm and measured how intentional people thought the harm was. Results indicate that people judge harmful consequences as intentional when they think the actor unjustifiably caused harm. Social roles were shown to alter intention judgments by making people responsible for preventing harm (thereby rendering the harm as an intentional neglect of one’s responsibilities) or for causing the harm (thereby excusing it as an unintentional byproduct of the role). Additionally, Experiment 3 conceptually replicated and moderated the side-effect effect —revealing that people think harmful side effects are intentional when the harm is unjustified but not when a role’s responsibility justifies it. We discuss the importance of social information—including roles—in how people judge others’ intentions.

人们的社会角色如何改变他人对造成伤害意图的看法？三个预先注册的基于小插图的实验（N= 788）操纵了造成伤害的人的社会角色，并衡量了人们故意认为伤害的程度。结果表明，当人们认为参与者无理地造成伤害时，他们认为有害后果是故意的。社会角色被证明可以通过使人们对防止伤害负责（从而将伤害视为故意忽视某人的责任）或对他人造成伤害（从而将其视为角色的非故意副产品）来改变意图判断。另外，实验3从概念上复制并缓解了副作用-揭示了人们认为，如果伤害是不合理的，则有害的伤害是有意的，而当角色的责任证明责任不成立时，则是有害的。我们讨论了社会信息（包括角色）对人们如何判断他人意图的重要性。