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People engage in intentional misunderstandings to get around direct non-compliance. In other words, they use loopholes. Previous work showed that adults and children consider loophole behavior to be less costly than direct non-compliance (Bridgers, Schulz, & Ullman, 2021), and suggested this is a primary reason for their use: loopholes will land you in less trouble than defiance. However, we propose that this difference between loopholes and defiance will not hold for a specific, important context: moral violations. We replicate the finding that loopholes are less costly in a neutral context but find that engaging in loopholes in a moral context is as bad as non- compliance (Experiment 1, N=360). We then use a direct comparison between loopholes and non-compliance (N=150) to investigate whether in some contexts loopholes will be seen as even worse than non-compliance. We replicate the differential effect of the moral context from Experiment 1, but do not find a reversal. We discuss possible extensions and limitations, and consider why loopholes in moral violations may be uniquely unacceptable.
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Loopholes, a Window into Value Alignment and the Learning of Meaning
Finding and exploiting loopholes is a familiar facet of fable, law, and everyday life. But cognitive, computational, and em- pirical work on this behavior remains scarce. Engaging with loopholes requires a nuanced understanding of goals, social ambiguity, and value alignment. We trace loophole behavior to early childhood, and we propose that exploiting loopholes results from a conflict in actors’ goals combined with a pres- sure to cooperate. A survey of 260 parents reporting on 425 children reveals that loophole behavior is prevalent, frequent, and diverse in daily parent-child interactions, emerging around ages five to six and tapering off from around ages nine to ten into adolescence. A further experiment shows that adults con- sider loophole behavior in children as less costly than non- compliance, and children increasingly differentiate loophole behavior from non-compliance from ages four to ten. We dis- cuss limitations of the current work together with a proposal for a formal framework for loophole behavior.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2118096
- PAR ID:
- 10453068
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society,
- Volume:
- 43
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
