Poster #132 - The Role of ADHD in Judgments of Impulsive Moral and Conventional Rule Violations

• In Event: 1-115 - Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Section - Moral Development

Integrative Statement

Are people who have ADHD exempt from moral responsibility due to their condition? Because impulsiveness is one of the central symptoms of ADHD (Singh, 2011), a diagnosis of ADHD may affect how others judge the moral responsibility of those who have ADHD and who engage in unplanned rule violations. In addition, some research has investigated whether individuals with the diagnosis of ADHD themselves also consider the diagnosis to provide a reasonable explanation for impulsive morally-relevant behavior (Honkasilta et al. 2016). These issues have practical importance because of the looping effect, which finds that the expectations of others can affect behavior (Hacking 1995).

Impulsiveness may also relate to issues of theory since impulsiveness may affect judgments of intentions related to violations of moral rules having to do with justice and welfare differently than local conventional rules (Smetana, 2006). Given that moral rules are not arbitrary and are naturally linked to harm, if one is knowingly breaking a moral rule, even if it is unplanned, the action is intrinsically linked to harm. If one is knowingly breaking a conventional rule, the action may only be contingently connected with bad intentions (Griffin & Lomborozo, 2017).

We expect that unplanned violations will be judged as more acceptable, especially when they are conventional. Protagonists with ADHD are expected to be judged less responsible by those without ADHD, but participants with ADHD are expected to judge protagonists with and without ADHD as equally responsible. Judgments are not expected to differ by gender of the protagonist.

Participants include 96 adult college students with and without a diagnosis of ADHD. The sample currently has 14% who report having a diagnosis ADHD and 78% who report being female. Additional data is currently being collected through MTurk to provide a more balanced sample.

Assessments include hypothetical scenarios in an online survey. In a within-subject design, participants judged the acceptability of rule violations by a child around age 10 in 16 scenarios, which varied by domain of violation (moral or conventional), protagonist diagnosis (ADHD, no diagnosis), impulsive or planned, and protagonist sex (boy or girl), for a total of 16 scenarios.

As expected, initial results indicate that participants judged moral violations (M = 1.98) as less acceptable than conventional violations (M = 2.78), F(1,92) = 77.01, p = .000, ηp2= .46. There were no effects of participants’ diagnosis of ADHD, but in assessments that described a protagonist with ADHD, violations were judged to be more acceptable overall, F(1,92) = 11.97, p = .001, ηp2 = 11, for protagonists with ADHD (M = 2.50) than for protagonists without ADHD (M = 2.27). This initial result indicates that a diagnosis of ADHD appears to affect emerging adults’ reasoning about responsibility for violations. Finally there was an interaction between the gender of the protagonist and the descriptions of impulse violations, F(1,92)=7.03, p = .009, ηp2= .07. See Figure 1, which demonstrates that male protagonists were judged more negatively when the violation was planned but female protagonist were judged more negatively when violation was impulsive.

Authors

• Clare Elizabeth Conry-Murray, Saint Joseph's University
  Presenting Author

• Megan McKechnie, Saint Joseph's University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Nicole Olivieri-Pagan, Saint Joseph's University
  Non-Presenting Author