The role of reasoning and cognitive abilities in intentionality attribution and intent-based moral judgment

Moral judgment integrates intentions with outcomes. When they diverge, fast affective responses (System 1) bias judgments toward outcomes, while deliberative reasoning (System 2) regulates and integrates conflict. Outcomes can also shape perceived intentionality: the Knobe effect shows that negative side-effects are judged as more intentional than positive ones. This dissertation tests how reasoning and executive functions resolve such conflicts and reduce outcome-driven bias in intentionality and related moral judgments across five studies. Study 1 is a preregistered coordinate-based ALE meta-analysis of fMRI studies contrasting intentional vs accidental harm, revealing consistent right amygdala and left hippocampus activation that suggests salience coding and episodic reconstruction. These findings elevate the hippocampus as a core integrative substrate and highlight an overlooked facet of moral reasoning: scene construction and mental simulation. Study 2 extends these insights with a within-subject design crossing intentions and outcomes to examine how executive functions support evaluation and integration. Results show a broader role for inhibitory control beyond outcome-response suppression and a dissociation within working memory: visuospatial WM links to counterfactual scene simulation, verbal WM to integrating conflicting information. Studies 3 and 4 probe reasoning’s direct role in intentionality within the Knobe framework: concurrent cognitive load selectively reduced intentionality for positive side-effects, and individual propensity for rational reasoning was associated with reduced intentionality for negative side-effects via two distinct cognitive pathways, highlighting a specific link between reasoning and intent perception. Study 5 shifts from text to visual inference, showing that when intent must be inferred, observers default to norm-congruent counterfactuals, reversing the classic verbal Knobe asymmetry. Together, these findings show that higher cognition builds and updates representations of intentions, consequences, and their integration, deepening and specifying prior theoretical accounts of intent-based moral judgment.