Do people outside the West also judge acts wrong without reasons?
In Chinese, Indian and mainly Middle Eastern samples, a sizeable minority of people kept saying an act was wrong while admitting they could not say why, so moral dumbfounding is not just a Western quirk.
Source
Just wrong? Or just WEIRD? Investigating the prevalence of moral dumbfounding in non-Western samples
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Three online studies using a standard dumbfounding task: participants judge moral scenarios, face counterarguments, then choose between 'nothing wrong', 'wrong but no reason', or 'wrong with a reason'; exploratory individual-difference predictors
- N
- No single N: Study 1 had 165 Chinese students (42 did four scenarios, 123 did only the Cannibal scenario); Study 2 had 181 Indian participants; Study 3 retained 253 participants from mostly Middle Eastern and North African countries
- Population
- University students and graduates in China, India, and a mixed non-Western sample recruited through a university in Dubai
- Outcome
- Proportion choosing the explicit admission of having no reason (dumbfounded response) on the critical question for each scenario; links with individualism-collectivism and meaning in life
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
The researchers ran three online studies with non-Western participants: students in China, young adults in India, and a mixed sample mostly from the Middle East and North Africa recruited via a university in Dubai. Participants read short moral scenarios (such as consensual incest, eating a cadaver, the trolley problem, and a man stealing a drug to save his wife), rated how wrong each act was, and then read counterarguments that knocked down common reasons for condemning it. On a final 'critical' question they chose between saying nothing was wrong, saying it was wrong but they had no reason, or saying it was wrong and giving a reason. Only the explicit admission of having no reason was counted as dumbfounding, and the team also explored whether individualism-collectivism and meaning in life predicted it.
What they found
Dumbfounded responses appeared for every scenario in every sample, at rates reliably above zero. Half of the Chinese participants who did four scenarios (50%) and about half of the Indian sample (49.17%) gave a dumbfounded answer at least once, as did 39.13% of the mixed sample; across studies almost half of participants (256 of 513) did so. Rates for any one scenario were modest, between 9% and 36%, and which scenario caused the most dumbfounding differed by sample (the trolley problem in India and the mixed sample, the cadaver scenario in China). Individual-difference measures predicted responses only weakly and inconsistently.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The samples were university students or graduates recruited by convenience and snowball methods, and in two studies they answered in English, so they do not represent their countries and are themselves somewhat 'WEIRD'. The study is descriptive: it shows that dumbfounding occurs outside the West but does not compare cultures directly against a Western sample in the same study or reveal the mechanism behind it. The forced-choice critical question may misclassify people who have reasons but lack confidence in them, and Study 3 lost many participants to incomplete responses. Answering in a second language may itself shift moral judgments, which the authors flag as a possible confound.
Key terms
- Moral dumbfounding
- Maintaining a moral judgment (for example, 'that is wrong') while being unable to give a supporting reason for it.
- WEIRD samples
- Participants from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies, who dominate psychology research and may not represent humans in general.
- Critical slide
- The final question in the dumbfounding task, after counterarguments, where participants choose between 'nothing wrong', 'wrong but no reason', or 'wrong with a reason'.
- Moral judgment as categorization (MJAC)
- A theory proposing that moral judgments are ordinary categorizations of acts as right or wrong, learned through repeated goal-directed experience, which can become automatic without stored reasons.
- Social intuitionism
- The view that moral judgments come mainly from fast gut feelings, with reasoning usually produced afterwards to justify them.
- Individualism-collectivism
- A cultural dimension contrasting emphasis on personal goals and independence with emphasis on group goals and interdependence, split into horizontal (equality) and vertical (hierarchy) forms.
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Quiz yourself
What counted as a dumbfounded response in these studies?
Common questions
Why does it matter whether dumbfounding happens outside the West?
Earlier evidence came only from Western samples, so it was possible the effect reflected one culture's habits. Finding it in Chinese, Indian and mostly Middle Eastern samples suggests it reflects how moral judgment works more generally.
If most people gave reasons, does that disprove dumbfounding?
No. The claim is that dumbfounding exists, not that it is the usual response. People are motivated to justify their views, so admitting 'I have no reason' is uncomfortable and the conservative measure used here is expected to give low rates.
Why were the incest and cannibal scenarios dropped in Study 3?
The researchers worried they might offend participants in that sample, so they swapped in two older scenarios: a broken promise to a dying mother and a family eating their dog after it was killed by a car.
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