Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.