Detecting the Intention of Behavior by Presumption of Innocence: the Psychological Foundation of the Legal Principle of Innocence

When a behavior leads to two outcomes, one of which is good and the other is bad, how do we know which outcome was intentional and which was unintentional? With the purpose of identifying the mechanism of detecting behavior intention and in an experimental design, 132 children (61 girls) with a mean age of 55 months were selected from four preschools in Tehran's second district by the convenience sampling method and were randomly assigned to three groups of intentionless (who were not told anything about the intent of protagonist), good intention (who were told that the intention of protagonist was good), and bad intention (who were told that the intention of protagonist was bad). The research tool was a childish version of the Trolley Story in which the protagonist behaved in a way that had a good outcome and a bad outcome, and the subjects were asked to judge that: 1) Was the bad outcome intentional? 2) Did the protagonist have a duty to do that behavior? 3) Was the behavior of the protagonist good? Chi-square and ANOVA tests showed that in all three types of moral judgment, the intentionless and good intention groups were not different, but the difference between the intentionless and bad intention groups was significant. The findings show that the subjects used the presumption of innocence or the principle of innocence to detect the intent of the behavior, i.e. they perceived the behavior's good outcome as intentional and the behavior's bad outcome as unintentional.