Skirting the Sacred: Moral Contexts Increase the Cost of Intentional Misunderstandings

When people have conflicting goals, they sometimes use intentional misunderstandings (loopholes) to get around direct defiance. Both adults and children expect exploiting loopholes to be less costly than non-compliance (Bridgers et al., 2021; Bridgers et al., 2023; Qian et al., 2023). However, the mitigating effect of loopholes may not hold if they are used to dodge a moral obligation. Here, we replicated the finding that loopholes are less costly than non-compliance in neutral contexts, but found that loopholes were as bad as non-compliance in moral contexts (Experiment 1, N = 360). We then directly compared the behaviors to see if, in moral contexts, exploiting a loophole might be even worse than non-compliance (Experiment 2, N=150). We replicated the finding that loopholes are more exonerating in neutral than moral contexts, and that moral context has a differential effect, but did not find a reversal (Experiment 2, N=150). Finally, we assessed three negative indirect costs of loopholes (blame, permissibility, and offense) and again found a differential effect of moral context (Experiment 3, N = 453). We discuss why using loopholes in moral violations may be uniquely unacceptable.