Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Individual’s judgment on the appropriateness of social norm includes perceiving others mental states (theory of mind), butit might differ with the intervention aspects in real social contexts. Therefore, in this study we mainly focus on evaluatingwhether affective and cognitive theory of mind would affect social norm violation judgments and investigate whetherthe timing of mentalization involves the judgments. As a result, preconceived intention intervention (both affective andcognitive theory of mind) significantly affected the judgments of the appropriateness. However, only cognitive theory ofmind in attributing violation intentions after encountering the social norm statement was found to affect in the judgmentsof the appropriateness of norm violations. In summary, theory of mind plays an important role on the judgment ofappropriateness for social norm violation, but the timing of intervention matters significantly.