Intent-Based Moral Judgment in Old Age.

OBJECTIVES: Recent studies support the idea of an intent-to-outcome shift in moral judgments with age. We further assessed whether a reduced reliance on intentions is associated with aging in a preregistered study with 73 younger (20-41 years) and 79 older (70-84 years) adults, group-matched on education level. METHOD: Participants were presented with a set of moral cases to evaluate, created by varying orthogonally the valence (neutral, negative) of the information regarding the agent's intentions and the action's outcomes. RESULTS: The two age groups did not differ in the extent they relied on intentions in moral judgment. DISCUSSION: These results suggest that an intent-to-outcome shift might not be found in all aging populations, challenging prevailing theories suggesting that aging is necessarily associated with a reduced reliance on intentions.