CSLS Speaker Series: “The Social Architecture of Moral Judgment: How Responsibility and Group Structure Shape Collective Decisions”

Featuring Diag Davenport, Assistant Professor of Technology Policy, Governance, and Society, Goldman School of Public Policy and School of Information, UC Berkeley

Abstract: Moral decisions are often treated as private judgments—but in many of society’s most consequential contexts, they are shaped by collective structures that subtly alter how people vote and what they come to believe. Across jury data and experiments, I show that two forces systematically distort group decision-making: responsibility targeting (to whom people feel morally answerable) and pivotality (whether one’s vote determines the group’s outcome). These features shift punishment rates, skew beliefs, and create pressure to rationalize decisions— even in anonymous, low-stakes settings. The result is not just biased outcomes, but transformed moral reasoning. Institutions that rely on group decisions must recognize that design choices—like voting thresholds or normative framing—don’t merely guide process, they shape belief. If we want group verdicts to reflect genuine moral judgment, we must treat collective decision-making as a site of psychological engineering, not just deliberation.