Background: Previous research has shown that moral judgments are affected by social cognitive abilities, such as theory of mind (ToM). This study examines how information about an actor's beliefs and the consequences of their actions affect the moral evaluation of the character's behavior in social events. Our research builds upon previous studies, which have shown that these factors contribute differently to moral judgments made by both adults and young children.
Objectives: This study aimed to explore how participants with schizophrenia and healthy controls read stories about social situations in the context of moral judgments.
Material and methods: The study used the research procedure that included 4 variants of 16 scenarios describing social situations, and thus comprising 64 stories. After each story, participants evaluated their confidence level on a 4-point scale. To assess delusional beliefs, the Polish adaptation of the Peters Delusion Inventory (PDI) questionnaire and the Paranoia Checklist (PCh) were used. Respondents completed these questionnaires after completing the scenario test procedure.
Results: In social situations, patients with paranoid schizophrenia were found to evaluate actions of protagonists who attempted to harm another person more leniently than when it was an accident. Conversely, healthy individuals judged those actors who expressed intentions to hurt another person significantly more harshly than in an accident situation. Metacognition measures show that paranoid schizophrenia patients make moral judgments with high confidence, despite being based on an incorrect reading of the other person's intentions.
Conclusions: The study indicates that ToM has a significant impact on the moral judgment of others. Decreased moral cognition can result from both positive and negative symptoms. Deficits related to metacognition can also sustain such cognitive distortions.
Keywords: metacognition; moral judgments; paranoid schizophrenia; theory of mind.