Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

While violating prescriptive norms draws unfavorable judgments from observers, unknowingly doing so attenuates them, especially if ignorance is not willful. We test boundary conditions on this effect for legal violations. Using the Anglo-American reasonable person standard, Experiment 1 shows that ignorance of law substantially reduces blame for reasonable actions but provides little excuse for unreasonable ones. Experiment 2 examined whether regulatory expectations explain this asymmetry. Indeed, unreasonable actions generated stronger expectations that an average individual should know such action is prohibited, diminishing the exculpation conferred by being ignorant of the law. Reasonable actions, by contrast, were associated with lower regulatory expectations, making ignorance a more acceptable excuse. Counterfactual reasoning revealed parallel asymmetry: for unreasonable action, participants emphasized changes in the agent's behavior for preventing the violation; for reasonable actions, primary locus of change was external factors.