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Abstract

The role of perpetrator intentions in moral judgment is well established, but it is not well understood in the intergroup context of cultural appropriation. In three high-powered, pre-registered studies (total N = 2,769), we provide robust evidence that perceivers evaluate cultural copying less negatively when the actor has positive (versus negative) intentions. Across three different domains (fashion, food, and business), participants judged that White perpetrators who copied Black culture attempting to show appreciation were less appropriative, showed less disrespect, caused less harm, and warranted less confrontation (Studies 1–3) and boycotting (Study 3) than White perpetrators who copied for self-promotion. White individuals generally perceived less appropriation than Black individuals and evaluated it more permissively across dimensions, although both were similarly sensitive to intent (Studies 1–2). We contribute to the literatures on moral judgment and intergroup relations by laying empirical groundwork on cultural appropriation, an understudied phenomenon that unites the two.

Keywords

cultural appropriation intergroup relations moral judgment intentions race

In 2021, singer Jesy Nelson drew accusations of cultural appropriation for a music video in which her singing voice and appearance gave the impression that she was Black (when she herself is White; Khomami, 2021). In response to the backlash, Nelson replied by explaining that she “just wanted to celebrate [hip-hop and R&B music]” (Khomami, 2021), having grown up immersed in Black culture (Greenwood, 2021). Although Nelson’s response was premised on the assumption that her intentions to show appreciation might assuage the criticism against her, public discourse around culturally insensitive behavior has often called the relevance of the perpetrator’s intentions into question. While some discount whether a perpetrator’s intentions were good or bad, others argue that this factor is what distinguishes offensive from acceptable behavior (e.g., Chesterton, 2020). To shed light on the psychological processes behind these judgements, the current research explores how the valence of a copier’s intentions (i.e., negative and positive) shapes perceptions related to cultural appropriation. We also test whether perceptions differ among perceivers belonging to a typical perpetrator group (White individuals) and a frequently appropriated cultural group (Black individuals).

Cultural Appropriation

Cultural appropriation refers to the use, imitation, or possession of cultural elements from one group (a “source community”) by an outgroup member (Ziff & Rao, 1997). For example, in detaching blues music from its original context of racial struggle in the Jim Crow American South, White musicians may be said to be appropriating that musical form from Black culture (Jones, 1963; Rudinow, 1994). Although it is a relatively new topic of empirical investigation, legal scholars (e.g., Scafidi, 2005), philosophers (e.g., Young, 1994, 2005), and cultural critics (e.g., Baraka, 1987; Jones, 1963; McGee, 1972) have discussed cultural appropriation for decades. Since at least the 1960s, cultural commentators have criticized majority group members for taking and benefitting from the cultural products of historically oppressed minority groups (e.g., Jones, 1963).

We follow Mosley and Biernat (2021) in conceptualizing cultural appropriation as a moral phenomenon in an intergroup context. Laypeople appear to understand cultural appropriation in these terms as well, often supplying examples in which a dominant group member exploits a marginalized source community when asked to define the term (Katzarska-Miller et al., 2021). This lay understanding mirrors theoretical conceptualizations of morality in which the most prototypically wrong actions are those in which a powerful agent harms a vulnerable moral patient (Gray et al., 2012).

Intentions in Moral Judgment

Intentions are an essential input in moral judgment, with a large body of work demonstrating that the mental state underlying an action can shape evaluations of both the act and the actor (for a review, see Carlson, Bigman et al., 2022). For immoral acts (e.g., physical harm), the typical focus has been on the perpetrator’s awareness of and desire for a harmful outcome, which has consistently been shown to magnify perceptions of harm (Ames & Fiske, 2013; Schein & Gray, 2015) and attributions of blame (Ames & Fiske, 2015; Cushman, 2008). The valence (i.e., perceived goodness or badness) of the perpetrator’s ascribed mental state also plays a role: for instance, violent actors are evaluated less negatively when the motives behind their behavior are seen as justified (Reeder et al., 2002), and ambiguous remarks directed at a minority outgroup are judged as more acceptable when the speaker is known not to hold a prejudiced attitude toward the group (Almagro et al., 2022). Relevant work on moral or prosocial behavior (e.g., charitable donation) has focused on the effect of perceived selfish motivation, which has been found to undermine positive evaluations of the behavior (Barasch et al., 2014; Newman & Cain, 2014). Thus, existing work suggests that people view some mental states (e.g., selfish intent) as more blameworthy (or less praiseworthy) than others when evaluating moral actors and their actions.

Interestingly, the moral status of cultural copying is not consensually agreed upon, such that some view it as an extension of harmful colonial dynamics (e.g., Riley & Carpenter, 2016), whereas others may perceive it as morally neutral or even a moral good (e.g., Mounk, 2023). Indeed, the acts of cultural copying that most interest us in the present work may conceivably be seen as exploitative, even as the copier believes she is doing something praiseworthy (as in the case of singer Jesy Nelson). Existing work suggests that the valence of a copier’s intentions (e.g., whether they were attempting to benefit themselves or to show appreciation) should influence moral judgments of their action, but such acts are not well represented in the moral judgment literature.

Given the robust role of intentions in moral judgment, and the fact that people often claim to have had prosocial intentions when accused of cultural appropriation (e.g., Friedman, 2018), it would be theoretically valuable to identify factors that may amplify or diminish the influence of intentions on judgments about appropriation. Evaluations of cultural copying are already known to be shaped by group-based motivations (e.g., racial identification; Mosley, Biernat, & Adams, 2023), raising the possibility that sensitivity to perpetrator intentions may similarly depend on group membership in the perpetrator group versus the source community. However, the moral psychology literature has broadly tended to neglect the roles of actor and perceiver social identity (Hester & Gray, 2020; Mosley & Heiphetz, 2021). For insight into how information about intentions may interact with group membership, we therefore turn to the intergroup relations literature.

Intentions and Group Membership

In contexts of intergroup harm, a large body of work suggests that ingroup-protective motivations play a powerful role in shaping victim-group and perpetrator-group members’ construals of intergroup behavior (Doosje et al., 1998; Leach et al., 2007; Miron et al., 2010, 2011; Rotella & Richeson, 2013; Swim et al., 2003; for reviews, see Bilali & Vollhardt, 2019 and Carter & Murphy, 2015). With respect to cultural appropriation, whereas perpetrator-group individuals may be motivated to minimize guilt over ingroup wrongdoing (Tajfel & Turner, 1979), source-community individuals may have a distinct set of concerns, such as preserving autonomy over their cultural products (Kim, 2024). Indeed, recent work on cultural appropriation has shown that perpetrator-group members see less harm in cultural copying than source-community members, an effect mediated by source-community members’ greater experience of distinctiveness threat (i.e., concern over retaining a unique cultural identity; Mosley et al., 2021).

Most relevant for the current investigation is how group-based motivations may influence perceivers’ sensitivity to perpetrator intentions. While predictions for perpetrator-group individuals flow relatively straightforwardly from the intergroup relations literature, predictions for source-community group individuals are less clear due to mixed findings. Prior work on perpetrator-group individuals has found that they tend to accept social accounts (e.g., public explanations that a perpetrator lacked ill-intent) for ingroup wrongdoing, including racist statements (McClelland and Hunter, 1992), workplace discrimination (Davidson & Friedman, 1998), and police-citizen interactions (Simon et al., 2019), such that they judge these behaviors as less severe when told that the perpetrator lacked clear ill-intent. Consistent with this, White individuals also tend to think of racism as overt, easily observed, and stemming from clearly negative intentions (Nelson et al., 2013; Sommers & Norton, 2006), suggesting that perpetrator-group individuals may prioritize perceptions of malicious intent in their notions of intergroup harm.

Victim-group perceivers, who do not have the same stake in upholding the moral image of the perpetrator group, show differential attention to perpetrator intentions across the literature. For example, while White individuals tend to view acts as racist only when they stem from clearly negative intentions, Black individuals are additionally attuned to instances of racism that are more subtle or that lack such negative intentions (Salvatore & Shelton, 2007), suggesting that perpetrator intentions may matter less to source-community members when judging intergroup behavior. In line with this, some studies suggest that perceivers from marginalized groups are less influenced by social accounts (Davidson & Friedman, 1998; Friedman & Robinson, 1993), although other work has found no group differences in sensitivity to intent (Simon et al., 2019). Subjective feelings of status may also be important in this equation: in other recent work, non-dominant group members’ views on outgroup adoption of their cultures were only affected by perceptions of borrowers’ psychological investment in their culture when they were induced to feel that their group was low (vs. high) in status (Finkelstein & Rios, 2022). Therefore, although it seems likely that perpetrator-group perceivers will be sensitive to perpetrator intent in the domain of cultural appropriation, the findings with respect to source-community perceivers are more mixed.

Intentions and Appropriation

To our knowledge, the role of intentions in cultural appropriation has not been thoroughly explored empirically, and the present work builds on existing findings with a targeted experimental investigation. Mosley and Biernat (2021), in the first paper to empirically examine cultural appropriation, investigated how Black and White Americans perceived mirrored instances of cultural copying by Black and White actors on a variety of dimensions, including the extent to which participants viewed the copying as intentional (i.e., occurring on purpose). By contrast, the present research focuses primarily on the valence of the intentions (i.e., appreciation vs. self-promotion) behind instances of purposeful cultural copying. This operationalization of “intentions” is closer to the one employed in a more recent investigation into the predictors of cultural appropriation judgments in which the researchers assessed perceptions of bad intent as a dependent variable, although the stimuli in that investigation varied on a number of other dimensions simultaneously (Mosley, Heiphetz et al., 2023). Additionally, whereas intent was measured in these studies, we manipulate it to methodologically (rather than statistically) isolate its effect. A recent study that did manipulate perpetrator intentions using a controlled experimental vignette found that American undergraduates preferred to try a restaurant whose White owner copied Mexican food out of admiration for Mexican culture (versus a desire for profit; Alexanian et al., 2024). We build on this work by assessing moral judgments to rule out the possibility that the copier’s intentions influenced preferences solely through nonmoral processes, such as perceptions of the food’s authenticity or quality.

Perhaps the most relevant experimental investigation comes from Mosley (2024, Study 4), in which Black and White participants read about an instance of cultural copying that was either negatively or positively intentioned (i.e., a chef copies soul food out of a desire to monopolize the industry or to show admiration). In this study, while copying with negative intentions was perceived as more harmful than copying with positive intentions, Black participants actually showed this effect more strongly than White participants. However, we believe that the manipulation of intentions in this study was confounded with the presence of racial resentment in the negative intention condition, which could have been particularly offensive to Black participants. Namely, while the positive and negative conditions differed in the perpetrator’s intent to appreciate (“I only meant to celebrate soul food”) versus self-promote (“I have intentionally tried to show how my food is superior to other soul food chefs”), they also differed in the perpetrator’s warmth versus hostility toward the Black community (“society does not take [Blacks] seriously enough” versus “Many Blacks take themselves and their culture too seriously”). Moreover, overt racial animus may not be necessary for an act of cultural copying to be perceived as harmful. To isolate the effect of perpetrator intentions, we operationalize negative intentions in line with prevailing views on psychological selfishness, in which selfish actors are evaluated negatively not because they are actively hostile to others, but because they disregard others’ desires in pursuit of their own (Carlson, Adkins et al., 2022). We additionally build on this work by investigating these effects in high-powered samples, using previously untested domains of appropriation (e.g., commercial beauty products), with previously untested outcomes (e.g., boycotting). Overall, the existing literature clearly suggests that perpetrator mental states can influence perceptions of cultural copying, but the nature of their potential interaction with perceivers’ group membership remains unclear.

Overview of the Present Research

Given the documented importance of intentions in moral judgment, the frequent rejection of the relevance of intentions in discussions around cultural sensitivity, and the mixed findings on how group membership influences these judgments, we conducted a series of experimental investigations to determine whether and for whom perpetrator intentions matter. Across studies, we test whether a perpetrator’s self-promotion versus appreciation intentions (and accidental copying, a third condition in Study 2) influence perceptions of cultural appropriation, as well as perceptions of harm and disrespect (two theoretically distinct indications of moral disapproval; Graham et al., 2013), and critical behavioral responses toward the perpetrator (i.e., endorsement of confronting the perpetrator in Studies 1–3 and boycotting in Study 3). This choice of dependent variables stems from the observation (discussed above) that not everyone draws the same connections between intentions and moral outcomes in the context of cultural appropriation. For some people, the valence of a copier’s intentions might distinguish cultural theft or disrespect for cultural authority from respectful exchange. For others it may be irrelevant, suggesting the existence of moderators of sensitivity to intentions. In Studies 1 and 2, we examine these judgments specifically among members of a common perpetrator group (i.e., White Americans) and members of a common source community (i.e., Black Americans) to test group membership as one potential moderator of sensitivity to perpetrator intentions. In Study 3, we extend our findings to the general population and more explicitly into a business context, assessing perceivers’ willingness to boycott the perpetrator’s business. All studies were pre-registered on OSF prior to data collection (https://osf.io/u4az2), with each study serving as a replication and extension of earlier studies. All analyses were conducted using R statistical software (Version 4.5.2; R Core Team, 2023) and the rstatix (Version 0.7.2; Kassambara, 2023), tidyverse (Version 2.0.0; Wickham et al., 2019), psych (Version 2.5.3; Revelle, 2024), and emmeans (Version 1.11.0; Lenth, 2024) packages. Power analyses were conducted with G*Power (Faul et al., 2007).

Study 1

In Study 1, we examined the perspectives of individuals belonging to a typical perpetrator group (White Americans) and members of a typical source community (Black Americans). The goal of Study 1 was to investigate the influence of perpetrator intentions on judgments about cultural appropriation and to examine whether group membership moderates this influence.

We hypothesized that, overall, participants would judge a White perpetrator who copies Black culture with positive intentions (i.e., trying to show appreciation) as engaging in less appropriation, being less disrespectful, causing less harm, and being less deserving of confrontation than an actor with negative intentions (i.e., trying to promote themselves). Based on prior work, we also predicted that perpetrator intentions and participant membership in a perpetrator group versus source community would interact such that White perceivers would be more influenced by perpetrator intentions than Black perceivers. Specifically, we expected this interaction to be driven by White perceivers making particularly permissive judgments in the Appreciation intention condition.

Method

The materials, data, and code for all studies are available at our OSF repository (https://osf.io/u4az2). Our pre-registered hypotheses, a priori power analysis, and participant exclusions are available on OSF (https://osf.io/hpgdz). All participants in this project gave informed consent in accordance with the guidelines set forth by the Institutional Review Board at the authors’ home institution. All studies were approved by the IRB at the authors’ home institution.

Participants

We recruited 1,000 American participants (500 Black, 500 White)¹ from Prolific to participate in a study on current issues for monetary compensation. A total of 999 participants completed the study, and we excluded 49 who failed an attention check and 26 participants who did not select “White” or “Black” as a racial identification,² leaving a final sample of 924 participants (M_age = 36.78, SD_age = 13.60; 49.46% male, 49.35% female, 1.19% other; 50.65% Black).

Materials and procedure

Before being assigned to one of our experimental conditions, participants read a definition of cultural appropriation (following Mosley & Biernat, 2021): “Cultural appropriation refers to taking on elements of a culture other than one’s own. This can involve taking or using intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission.” After reading the definition, participants were assigned to one of two between-subjects conditions. In each condition, participants read a vignette where a White fashion designer organizes a runway show borrowing heavily from the Black Power aesthetic. We based this vignette on real-life instances where White fashion designers were called out for cultural appropriation after using elements of Black culture in their shows (e.g., Friedman, 2018). Participants then rated their perceptions of the designer’s intentions (as a manipulation check), the extent to which his behavior constituted cultural appropriation, the degree to which he was being disrespectful to Black culture, the harmfulness of his behavior, and the extent to which they endorsed confronting him about his behavior (all pre-registered). Participants then completed exploratory ratings of the vignette (reported in the Supplemental Material, hereafter “SM”), answered a series of standard demographic questions (e.g., gender, age, ethnicity, political ideology), and were debriefed before exiting the survey.

Intention manipulation

We manipulated the designer’s intentions behind borrowing from Black culture with two versions of the vignette: Self-Promotion Intention and Appreciation Intention. We aimed to represent intentions that could plausibly motivate White individuals to copy aspects of Black culture. Both versions of the vignette began the same way:

James is a fashion designer who makes high-end clothes that have appeared in many fashion shows. As designers often do, James wanted to make a political statement with his latest runway show. Although James is White, his latest collection made clear references to the Black Power movement with its leather jackets, berets, and sunglasses. James also specified that all models should wear Afros (with White models wearing wigs to achieve the look) and walk down the runway with one fist raised.

The ending of the vignette differed by experimental condition, with participants in the Self-Promotion intention condition reading (emphasis added here for clarity):

James copied Black culture for his own benefit intentionally, thinking that it would earn him recognition for his work. Now people on social media are calling James out for cultural appropriation. What do YOU think?

Meanwhile, participants in the Appreciation intention condition read:

James copied Black culture for his own benefit unintentionally, thinking that he was showing solidarity with Black culture. Now people on social media are calling James out for cultural appropriation. What do YOU think?

Manipulation check

We assessed the perceived intent of the fashion designer’s actions with a single item: “James is intentionally trying to copy Black culture for his own benefit” (Mosley & Biernat, 2021; Reysen et al., 2012). Participants indicated their agreement with the item on a 7-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree, 7 = strongly agree).

Perceptions of cultural appropriation

We assessed perceptions of appropriation using four items: “James is appropriating Black culture,” “James is copying Black culture,” “James is taking from Black culture,” and “James is displaying an element of culture that is not his own” (Mosley & Biernat, 2021; Reysen et al., 2012; α = .84). Participants indicated their agreement with the item on a 7-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree, 7 = strongly agree).

Perceptions of disrespect

We assessed perceptions of disrespect using two items: “James’s behavior shows a lack of respect for Black culture,” and “James does not respect Black culture” (adapted from Swim et al., 2003), r(922) = .82, p < .001.³ Participants indicated their agreement with the item on a 7-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree, 7 = strongly agree).

Perceptions of harm

We measured perceptions of harm using three items: “James is exploiting Black culture,” “James is being offensive to Black culture,” and “James is hurting Black culture” (Mosley & Biernat, 2021; Reysen et al., 2012; α = .90). Participants indicated their agreement with the item on a 7-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree, 7 = strongly agree).

Endorsement of confrontation

We measured endorsement of confrontation with two items: “James should be confronted about copying Black culture,” and “James should be told to stop copying Black culture” (Mosley & Biernat, 2021; Reysen et al., 2012), r(922) = .87, p < .001. Participants indicated their agreement with the item on a 7-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree, 7 = strongly agree).

Results

Manipulation check

We first tested whether our intention manipulation was successful. An independent-means t-test confirmed that the manipulation had a significant effect on perceptions of the actor’s self-promotion intent, t(843.69)⁴ = 10.90, p < .001, d = 0.72, 95% CI [0.58, 0.85], such that participants in the Appreciation intention condition perceived the designer to have less self-promotion intentions (M = 4.78, SD = 1.75) than participants in the Self-Promotion intention condition (M = 5.89, SD = 1.30).

Effect of intention

We next tested our hypotheses using a series of 2 (Intent: Self-Promotion vs. Appreciation) × 2 (Group Membership: Black vs. White) between-subjects analyses of variance (ANOVAs)⁵ on the mean ratings for each dependent variable. The ANOVAs for perceptions of appropriation, perceptions of disrespect, perceptions of harm, and endorsement of confrontation each indicated the predicted main effects of intent (all ps < .002; see Table 1 for the full ANOVA results for each dependent variable). As predicted and pre-registered, participants in the Self-Promotion intention condition perceived the behavior as more appropriative than participants in the Appreciation intention condition, more disrespectful, more harmful, and more deserving of confrontation (see Table 2 for all means and standard deviations).

Table 1.

Two-way analysis of variance on dependent variables in Study 1.

Dependent variable	Intention			Group membership			Intention × Group membership
Dependent variable	F(1, 920)	p	η_p²	F(1, 920)	p	η_p²	F(1, 920)	p	η_p²
Appropriation	13.72	<.001	.02	4.64	.031	.01	0.71	.398	.00
Disrespect	17.37	<.001	.02	24.59	<.001	.03	0.00	.999	.00
Harm	11.97	.001	.01	19.58	<.001	.02	0.30	.585	.00
Confrontation	9.33	.002	.01	22.45	<.001	.02	1.97	.161	.00

Note. The effect of Intention reflects the difference between the Self-Promotion and Appreciation intention conditions. The effect of group membership reflects the difference between Black and White participants.

Table 2.

Means and standard deviations for all dependent variables in Study 1.

Dependent variable and intention condition	White AmericansM (SD)	Black AmericansM (SD)
Appropriation	n_S = 236, n_A = 220	n_S = 230, n_A = 238
Self-Promotion	5.71 (1.13)	5.81 (1.20)
Appreciation	5.36 (1.20)	5.59 (1.12)
Disrespect	n_S = 236, n_A = 220	n_S = 230, n_A = 238
Self-Promotion	4.15 (1.65)	4.71 (1.84)
Appreciation	3.68 (1.70)	4.24 (1.64)
Harm	n_S = 236, n_A = 220	n_S = 230, n_A = 238
Self-Promotion	4.46 (1.63)	4.88 (1.63)
Appreciation	4.03 (1.67)	4.56 (1.62)
Confrontation	n_S = 236, n_A = 220	n_S = 230, n_A = 238
Self-Promotion	4.70 (1.80)	5.09 (1.76)
Appreciation	4.17 (1.92)	4.89 (1.66)

Note. Subscripts denote intention condition (S = Self-Promotion; A = Appreciation).

Effect of group membership

Counter to our predictions, there was no Intention × Group interaction (all ps > .161); we instead observed an unqualified main effect of participant group (all ps < .031). Across intention conditions, White participants perceived the behavior as less appropriative, disrespectful, harmful, and deserving of confrontation compared to Black participants, a pattern we expected to observe only in the Appreciation intention condition. Figure 1 depicts means, 95% confidence intervals, and the distributions of individual ratings for Black and White participants on all dependent variables in each intention condition.

Figure 1.

Mean ratings on dependent variables by intention condition and group membership in Study 1.

Study 2

Study 1 provided evidence that perceivers take a White actor’s intentions into account when evaluating their cultural copying, supporting our primary pre-registered prediction. However, none of the dependent variables provided support for our prediction that intentions would have a larger effect among White participants than Black participants.

While we did not observe our predicted Intention × Group interaction in Study 1, it is possible that the design of Study 1 did not provide the optimal test for this interaction. For one, by directly informing participants of the perpetrator’s private mental state, we may have inadvertently prevented typical processes of inferring perpetrator intentions. The wording of our vignette also introduced some ambiguity regarding the object of our manipulation: the positive vs. negative valence of the intentions underlying the copying (which is what we wanted to manipulate), or the perpetrator’s awareness of the cultural copying itself (which we were not trying to manipulate).⁶ As a result, the intention manipulation in Study 1 may not have evoked the same psychological processes that operate in most real-world judgments about cultural appropriation. Moreover, while our description of the perpetrator’s action as being for their “own benefit” across intention conditions was meant to hold benefits to the actor constant, it may have inadvertently weakened the effect of intention by framing the action as selfish even in the Appreciation condition.

Therefore, in Study 2 we aimed to replicate the effects of Study 1 (particularly the unqualified main effect of group membership, which we had not predicted) with a different vignette, which would allow us to refine our manipulation of intentions and test the generalizability of our effects. This vignette provided information about the perpetrator’s intentions via the public account he gave after being confronted, clarified in the Self-Promotion and Appreciation intention conditions that the perpetrator was aware of their copying, and included a third condition (“Unaware”) in which the copying was accidental.

Our pre-registered predictions for Study 2 were based on the results of Study 1 and applied only to the Appreciation and Self-Promotion intention conditions. First, we predicted that the main effect of intention would replicate and generalize to the new vignette such that a perpetrator copying Black culture with positive intentions would be evaluated less negatively than one doing so with negative intentions. Second, we predicted an unqualified main effect of group membership such that Black participants would evaluate the perpetrator more negatively across intent conditions, replicating the result from Study 1. We pre-registered our hypotheses, a priori power analysis, and participant exclusions on OSF (https://osf.io/84zy2). We did not make a priori predictions regarding the exploratory “Unaware” condition, although we reasoned that White Americans might be particularly likely to identify with and thus excuse someone who had appropriated out of ignorance, because White Americans themselves tend to be less knowledgeable than Black Americans about Black history (Bonam et al., 2019; Nelson et al., 2013).

Method

Participants

We recruited 1,200 American participants (600 Black, 600 White) from Prolific to participate in a study on current issues for monetary compensation. A total of 1,201 participants completed the study, and we excluded 39 participants who failed an attention check and 35 participants who did not select “White” or “Black” as a racial identification,⁷ leaving a final sample of 1,127 participants (M_age = 38.26, SD_age = 18.82; 49.51% male, 49.51% female, 0.98% other; 51.11% Black).

Materials and procedure

In Study 2, we adapted a vignette from Mosley and Biernat (2021) in which a White chef cooks and sells soul food in his restaurant. Although soul food has heavily influenced modern-day American Southern food, non-Black individuals unfamiliar with the history of soul food may attribute it to the American South in general and subsequently appropriate soul food without knowing it. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions: one in which the chef knowingly rebranded soul food as Southern food thinking it would be more profitable (Self-Promotion intent), one in which he knowingly rebranded soul food as Southern food thinking he was respecting the food’s origin in the Southern United States (Appreciation intent), or one in which he did not know that the food originated with Black culture (Unaware). As in real cases of cultural appropriation, the perpetrator in this vignette not only borrowed and profited from elements of another culture, but also erased their cultural origins by rebranding them (in this case, as “Southern food”). Participants read:

A trendy new LA restaurant, Nick’s Southern Comfort, has already achieved acclaim for its popular and unique spin on cuisine such as deep fried chicken, hushpuppies, collard greens, chitlins, and black-eyed peas. San Francisco chef Nick Miller, renowned chef to celebrities, who also earned a Michelin star for his second restaurant Octaviand, just opened up a new American Southern food restaurant in downtown LA that boasts of all locally sourced ingredients. “Nick Miller is considered one of America’s premier experts on Southern food, and has grabbed quite a bit of media attention for his distinctive dishes,” raved Food Critic Magazine. Not everyone is a fan, however—some are accusing Miller, who is White, of culturally appropriating soul food, a cuisine innovated by Black Americans centuries ago.

Participants in the Self-Promotion intention condition went on to read (emphasis added here for clarity):

When reached for comment, Miller said he was aware of the food’s roots in Black culture and branded the food as “Southern” to attract more customers and increase profits.

Participants in the Appreciation intention condition went on to read:

When reached for comment, Miller said he was aware of the food’s roots in Black culture and branded the food as “Southern” to pay respect to the history of Black American culture and the food’s origin in the Southern US.

Participants in the Unaware condition went on to read:

When reached for comment, Miller said he was unaware of the food’s roots in Black culture and branded the food as “Southern” because he genuinely thought it was generic Southern cuisine, not specifically African American cuisine.

The measures in Study 2 were identical to those in Study 1, including the measures of appropriation (α = .93), disrespect, r(1125) = .90, p < .001, harm (α = .93), and endorsement of confrontation, r(1125) = .90, p < .001. The procedure for Study 2 was identical to the procedure for Study 1.

Results

Manipulation check

We first tested whether our intention manipulation was successful. A one-way ANOVA (three levels: Self-Promotion intention, Appreciation intention, or Unaware) confirmed that there was a significant main effect of Intention on perceptions of the actor’s self-promotion intent, F(2, 1124) = 40.53, p < .001, η_p² = .07. Pairwise comparisons indicated that participants in the Self-Promotion intention condition perceived significantly more self-promotion intent than participants in the Appreciation intention condition, t(1124) = 4.87, p < .001,⁸ d = 0.36, 95% CI [0.21, 0.50] (M_S = 4.56, SD_S = 1.90; M_A = 3.90, SD_A = 1.82), and participants in the exploratory Unaware condition, t(1124) = 8.99, p < .001, d = 0.65, 95% CI [0.51, 0.80] (M_U = 3.35, SD_U = 1.84). Participants in the Appreciation intention condition also perceived significantly more self-promotion intent compared to participants in the Unaware condition, t(1124) = 4.06, p < .001, d = 0.30, 95% CI [0.15, 0.44].

Effect of intention

We tested our hypotheses using a series of 3 (Intention: Self-Promotion, Appreciation, or Unaware) × 2 (Group Membership: Black vs. White) between-subjects ANOVAs on the mean ratings for each dependent variable, followed up by pairwise comparisons among the intention conditions. In line with our pre-registered predictions for this study, the ANOVAs for perceptions of appropriation, disrespect, and harm each indicated significant main effects of Intention (all ps ⩽ .033; see Table 3 for the full ANOVA results for each dependent variable). The ANOVA for endorsement of confrontation indicated no significant main effect of Intention, F(2, 1121) = 1.25, p = .286, η_p² = .00, contrary to the other dependent variables and our pre-registered predictions. As pre-registered, we found no interaction between intention and group membership (all ps ⩾ .146).

Table 3.

Two-way analyses of variance on dependent variables in Study 2.

Dependent variable	Intention			Group membership			Intention × Group membership
Dependent variable	F(2, 1121)	p	η_p²	F(1, 1121)	p	η_p²	F(1, 1121)	p	η_p²
Appropriation	7.63	.001	.01	215.16	<.001	.16	0.14	.869	.00
Disrespect	4.69	.009	.01	141.75	<.001	.11	1.93	.146	.00
Harm	3.43	.033	.01	169.62	<.001	.13	1.14	.321	.00
Confrontation	1.25	.286	.00	159.20	<.001	.12	1.18	.307	.00

Note. The effect of Intention reflects the omnibus effect across all three intention conditions (Self-Promotion, Appreciation, and Unaware). The effect of group membership reflects the difference between Black and White participants.

Pairwise comparisons collapsing across group membership indicated that, as predicted, participants in the Self-Promotion intention condition perceived more appropriation than participants in the Appreciation intention condition, t(1121) = 2.42, p = .041, d = 0.18, 95% CI [0.03, 0.32], more disrespect, t(1121) = 3.06, p = .006, d = 0.22, 95% CI [0.08, 0.37], and more harm, t(1121) = 2.46, p = .037, d = 0.18, 95% CI [0.04, 0.32]. The pairwise comparison for endorsement of confrontation was nonsignificant, t(1121) = 1.53, p = .278, d = 0.11, 95% CI [−0.03, 0.25], consistent with the nonsignificant omnibus result (see Table 4 for all means and standard deviations).

Table 4.

Means and standard deviations for all dependent variables in Study 2.

Dependent variable and intention condition	White AmericansM (SD)	Black AmericansM (SD)
Appropriation	n_S = 192, n_A = 177, n_U = 182	n_S = 190, n_A = 192, n_U = 194
Self-Promotion	3.84 (1.56)	5.12 (1.55)
Appreciation	3.52 (1.56)	4.90 (1.45)
Unaware	3.36 (1.58)	4.74 (1.56)
Disrespect	n_S = 192, n_A = 177, n_U = 182	n_S = 190, n_A = 192, n_U = 194
Self-Promotion	2.61 (1.48)	4.05 (1.92)
Appreciation	2.48 (1.41)	3.45 (1.67)
Unaware	2.59 (1.55)	3.72 (1.83)
Harm	n_S = 192, n_A = 177, n_U = 182	n_S = 190, n_A = 192, n_U = 194
Self-Promotion	2.62 (1.49)	4.05 (1.75)
Appreciation	2.45 (1.47)	3.64 (1.59)
Unaware	2.55 (1.49)	3.65 (1.75)
Confrontation	n_S = 192, n_A = 177, n_U = 182	n_S = 190, n_A = 192, n_U = 194
Self-Promotion	2.52 (1.52)	4.01 (1.92)
Appreciation	2.44 (1.53)	3.71 (1.76)
Unaware	2.66 (1.65)	3.77 (1.84)

Note. Subscripts on each sample size denote intention conditions (S = Self-Promotion, A = Appreciation, and U = Unaware).

As compared to the exploratory Unaware condition, participants in the Self-Promotion intention condition also perceived significantly more appropriation, t(1121) = 3.86, p < .001, d = 0.28, 95% CI [0.14, 0.42], although they did not perceive different levels of disrespect, t(1121) = 1.49, p = .294, d = 0.11, 95% CI [−0.03, 0.25], or harm, t(1121) = 1.99, p = .114, d = 0.15, 95% CI [0.00, 0.29]. No comparison between the Unaware condition and the Appreciation intention condition was significant; participants in these conditions perceived similar levels of appropriation, t(1121) = 1.41, p = .334, d = 0.10, 95% [−0.04, 0.25], disrespect, t(1121) = −1.57, p = .260, d = −0.12, 95% CI [−0.26, 0.03], and harm, t(1121) = −0.48, p = .882, d = −0.04, 95% CI [−0.18, 0.11].

Effect of group membership

Consistent with our pre-registered predictions for this study, the ANOVAs for perceptions of appropriation, perceptions of disrespect, perceptions of harm, and endorsement of confrontation each indicated significant main effects of group membership (all ps ⩽ .001). Compared to White participants, Black participants perceived more appropriation, more disrespect, more harm, and endorsed confronting the perpetrator more across intent conditions. Figure 2 depicts means, 95% confidence intervals, and the distributions of individual ratings for all dependent variables in each intention condition.

Figure 2.

Mean ratings on dependent variables by intention condition (collapsed across racial groups) in Study 2.

Study 3

In Study 2 we again observed effects of actor intentions on perceptions of appropriation, disrespect, and harm, such that participants approved less of a White actor’s behavior when he intended to copy Black culture for his own benefit compared to when he intended to show respect (while the effect of intention on endorsement of confrontation was not significant, it was in the expected direction; we discuss the consistency of effects across studies in the section titled “Single-Paper Meta-Analysis” below). As in Study 1, we observed no group-by-intention interaction: White participants consistently made more permissive judgments than Black participants across intention conditions, and perpetrator intentions were not more influential on White participants compared to Black participants.

Across Studies 1 and 2, we presented evidence that perceivers take into account the intentions behind a perpetrator’s act of cultural appropriation, exhibiting more lenient moral judgments when the perpetrator’s intentions were positive (i.e., to show appreciation) versus when they were negative (i.e., to promote oneself). Given that debates around appropriation often involve commercial activities, such as the marketing and sale of cosmetics, another highly relevant outcome in the domain of cultural appropriation is consumer decision making. People commonly boycott companies as a way of expressing ethical concerns about the companies’ practices, withholding profits as a way of exerting pressure on them to change (Copeland & Boulianne, 2022). Engaging in a boycott implies punitive motivations that are not implied by our other measures (even endorsement of confrontation implies only a desire to correct, but not necessarily to punish, the perpetrator’s behavior), making boycotting a valuable extension of our initial dependent variables.

Thus, in Study 3, we aimed to replicate the effects observed in Studies 1 and 2 in a new domain (i.e., commercial beauty products) while exploring a new variable, boycotting, as a potential downstream consequence of the perpetrator’s intentions. To further test the robustness of our initial findings, we examined the effect of intentions in a general population sample with an additional manipulation check assessing perceived bad intent (to establish that self-promotion intentions are indeed seen as worse than appreciation intentions) in a novel vignette. Our vignette was based on a real-world controversy involving the sale of sleeping bonnets, a product associated with Black beauty practices (e.g., Callahan, 2019). Black people, and Black women especially, face stigma and shame when they wear bonnets in public (e.g., Harvin, 2021, who notes the disproportionate scrutiny of Black women’s presentability compared to that of White women).

Our pre-registered predictions for Study 3 mirrored those of Study 2, such that we expected participants would judge the business owner’s action as less appropriative, less disrespectful, less harmful, and warranting less confrontation when she acted out of positive intentions compared to negative intentions. We furthermore expected this pattern to hold with participants’ willingness to boycott the business, with participants in the Appreciation intention condition being less willing to boycott the business compared to those in the Self-Promotion intention condition. We pre-registered our hypotheses, a priori power analysis, and participant exclusions on OSF (https://osf.io/uy4fq).

Method

Participants

We recruited 730 American participants from CloudResearch’s Connect platform to participate in a study on current issues for monetary compensation. A total of 732 participants completed the study, and we excluded 14 participants who failed an attention check,⁹ leaving a final sample of 718 participants (M_age = 39.05, SD_age = 14.72; 49.86% male, 49.44% female, 0.70% other; 66.43% White, 9.75% Asian, 8.08% Black, 5.85% Hispanic, 8.22% multiracial, 1.39% other, and 0.28% Native American).

Materials and procedure

In Study 3, participants were randomly assigned to read about a White business owner who tried to either capitalize on her racial privilege for profit (Self-Promotion intentions) or to leverage it to help the Black community (Appreciation intentions). Participants across conditions read:

Entrepreneur Jenny Campbell recently released a new product, the Wrappie—a satin bonnet designed to protect one’s hair while sleeping. Campbell was celebrated in a magazine for “the creativity behind her design and the way she addressed an issue that many women just didn’t have a good solution for.” However, Black women have used similar hair wraps for this purpose for centuries, and have often experienced stigma because of it. Campbell, who is White, knew this and purposely took her inspiration from the bonnet found in Black culture. Now people online are calling her and her company out for cultural appropriation.

Participants in the Self-Promotion intention condition read (emphasis added here for clarity):

It was later revealed that Campbell thought her status as a White person would give her bonnet an edge on the market, ultimately aiming to profit from the African American community.

Participants in the Appreciation intention condition read (emphasis added here for clarity):

It was later revealed that Campbell thought her status as a White person would make the bonnet more accepted by society, ultimately aiming to benefit the African American community.

The measures of appropriation (α = .93), disrespect, r(716) = .87, p < .001, harm (α = .94), and endorsement of confrontation, r(716) = .90, p < .001, were identical to those used in Studies 1 and 2. Boycotting intentions were assessed using two items (“I would support a boycott of the ‘Wrappie’ product”; “I would support a boycott of Jenny Campbell’s company”; r(716) = .90, p < .001). Finally, as a robustness check of the manipulation check we used in Studies 1 and 2, we supplemented our original manipulation check with two additional items assessing perceptions of 1) whether the business owner had bad intentions when she copied Black culture and 2) the business owner’s intentions to benefit herself vs. the Black community. The results of both of these new manipulation checks are consistent with our original item and are reported in the Supplemental Material.

Results

Manipulation check

Independent means t-tests indicated that participants in the Self-Promotion intention condition attributed significantly more self-promotion intentions to the business owner compared to participants in the Appreciation intention condition, t(715.31) = 4.63, p < .001, d = 0.35, 95% CI [0.20, 0.50] (M_S = 5.07, SD_S = 1.93; M_A = 4.42, SD_A = 1.85), confirming that our manipulation of perpetrator intentions was successful.

Effect of intention

In line with our pre-registered hypotheses, we observed significant effects of perpetrator intentions on perceptions of disrespect, perceptions of harm, endorsement of confrontation, and willingness to boycott. Participants in the Self-Promotion intention condition perceived the small business owner’s action as significantly more disrespectful, harmful, and warranting more confrontation, compared to participants in the Appreciation intention condition, and they similarly reported greater support for a boycott of the company (all ps ⩽ .03 and ds ⩾ 0.16; Table 5 contains all descriptive statistics and the results of independent-samples t-tests between conditions). While the predicted effect of intentions on appropriation was in the predicted direction, it was not statistically significant (p = .116). Figure 3 depicts means, 95% confidence intervals, and the distributions of individual ratings for all dependent variables in each intention condition. In an exploratory analysis, we coded the most commonly reported racial groups (White, Asian, and Black, with White as the reference) and entered them into an interaction with intent. All Group × Intention interactions were nonsignificant (ps > .28).

Table 5.

Mean ratings by intention condition and results of t-tests in Study 3.

Dependent variable	Intention condition M (SD)		t	df	p	d	95% CI
Dependent variable	Self-Promotion(n = 361)	Appreciation(n = 357)	t	df	p	d	95% CI
Appropriation	4.85 (1.67)	4.66 (1.62)	1.57	715.69	.116	0.12	[−0.03, 0.26]
Disrespect	4.21 (2.01)	3.52 (1.74)	4.88	704.26	<.001	0.36	[0.22, 0.52]
Harm	3.96 (1.94)	3.49 (1.71)	3.46	706.17	.001	0.26	[0.11, 0.41]
Confrontation	4.02 (2.08)	3.70 (1.88)	2.17	710.15	.030	0.16	[0.01, 0.30]
Boycotting	3.79 (2.11)	3.21 (1.83)	3.90	704.76	<.001	0.29	[0.14, 0.44]

Figure 3.

Mean ratings on dependent variables by intention condition in Study 3.

Interim Discussion

Across Studies 1–3, participants evaluated an act of cultural copying more negatively (i.e., as more disrespectful and harmful), and endorsed more critical behavioral responses (i.e., confrontation and boycotting) when the perpetrator was motivated by self-promotion (versus appreciation). Interestingly, in Study 3 participants did not perceive the appreciating perpetrator as less appropriative than the self-promoting perpetrator, even though they did make more permissive judgments about her actions and the appropriate consequences for them.

Finally, we conducted a series of single-paper meta-analyses (McShane & Böckenholt, 2017) on data pooled across Studies 1–3 to quantify the consistency of these effects across studies.

Single-Paper Meta-Analysis

Single-paper meta-analysis (SPM) is a method of synthesizing the results of multiple studies. One strength of this approach is that it can quantify the unique contribution of method factors to the variability of effects between studies (also known as heterogeneity) using a statistic known as I² (McShane & Böckenholt, 2017). For this analysis, we pooled data from Studies 1–3 (n = 2,393, of which 924 came from Study 1, 751 from Study 2, from which we omitted the Unaware condition, and 718 from Study 3).¹⁰ Because we did not recruit participants by race or ethnicity in Study 3, the sample for that study did not lend itself to analysis by participant group membership. Following McShane and Böckenholt’s recommendation for scenarios where a factor is not present across all studies in a paper, we therefore treated Black and White participants from Studies 1 and 2 as separate “studies” for the SPM, while treating the whole sample from Study 3 as another study. We conducted a separate SPM for each of our dependent variables, except for boycotting, given that it was only assessed in Study 3.

The results of the SPMs suggest that the effect of perpetrator intent, while variable across studies and participant groups, was present across dependent variables: perceptions of appropriation, perceptions of harm, perceptions of disrespect, and endorsement of confrontation. In general, perpetrators with self-promotion intentions were rated as more appropriative (SPM estimate = 0.26, 95% CI [0.15, 0.37], I² = 98.49%, 95% CI [97.99%, 98.87%]), disrespectful (SPM estimate = 0.47, 95% CI [0.28, 0.66], I² = 97.70%, 95% CI [96.80%, 98.34%]), harmful (SPM estimate = 0.36, 95% CI [0.23, 0.50], I² = 98.26%, 95% CI [97.66%, 98.71%]), and deserving of confrontation (SPM estimate = 0.28, 95% CI [0.13, 0.42], I² = 98.57%, 95% CI [98.10%, 98.92%]) compared to perpetrators with appreciation intentions. Figure 4 depicts these effect size estimates, as well as the estimated effect for each study individually. The high estimates of I² suggest substantial heterogeneity due to method factors, which makes sense given that each study used different stimuli.¹¹

Figure 4.

Single-paper meta-analytic estimates of effect of perpetrator intentions.

General Discussion

Perpetrators’ intentions are known to be an essential input for moral judgment generally, but their role in the intergroup context of cultural appropriation is not well understood. Across three studies, using pre-registration and replication, we show that perceivers evaluate instances of cultural copying less negatively when the actor’s intentions are positive (e.g., seeking to show appreciation) compared to when they are negative (e.g., seeking personal profit). We show that these findings generalize across various contexts in which cultural appropriation commonly occurs, including fashion, food, and beauty products (although with some variability, which we discuss later in this section). Our results also hold across more than one operationalization of intentions: in Studies 1 and 2, the perpetrator copied Black culture in pursuit of either cultural appreciation or personal gain, while in Study 3, the perpetrator did so in pursuit of either the reduction of anti-Black racism or personal gain (believing in each case that her White status would help her achieve her goal).¹² Overall, participants judged that a White perpetrator who copied Black culture under the belief that they were being appreciative or helpful was less appropriative, showed less disrespect, caused less harm, and warranted less confrontation than one who copied Black culture specifically for personal gain.

In addition, our targeted recruitment of Black and White Americans in Studies 1 and 2 allowed us to investigate perceptions of cultural appropriation from the perspectives of members of the target culture and the perpetrator’s ingroup. In line with prior research, we found that White individuals generally perceived less appropriation than Black individuals and evaluated it less negatively on dimensions implicated in moral judgment. Contrary to our initial expectations, White participants were not significantly more influenced by perpetrator intentions than Black participants. As we explore in the Supplemental Material, the effect of intentions was also not reliably moderated by political ideology or, among Black participants, stigma consciousness.

While we observed overall effects of perpetrator intentions across dependent variables, the SPM (as summarized in Figure 4) reveals that the point estimates may obscure potentially important variability across vignettes and participant groups. For instance, while the SPM-estimated effect of intentions among White participants evaluating the food vignette was not significantly different from zero (Estimate = 0.14, 95% CI [−0.16, 0.43]), the equivalent effect in the hair wrap scenario, where 66.43% of participants identified as White, was among the largest effects across studies (Estimate = 0.68, 95% CI [0.41, 0.96]). Indeed, participant feedback in Study 2 (along the lines of, “this is just what poor Southerners ate”) suggests that White participants may have been on average less knowledgeable about the historical connection between soul food and the institution of slavery, which may account for their tendency to evaluate the White chef’s copying of soul food as not disrespectful, regardless of his intentions. This would be consistent with existing work demonstrating that intergroup differences in perceptions of present-day racism are mediated by differential knowledge of historical racism (Bonam et al., 2019; Nelson et al., 2013).

Effect sizes also varied across dependent variables, with appropriation and endorsement of confrontation showing the smallest effects. The small effect on endorsement of confrontation is understandable given that direct confrontation could be unpleasant and socially costly (Monteith et al., 2025; whereas boycotting, a potentially less costly behavior, showed a larger effect on par with perceived harm). The small effect on perceptions of appropriation is more puzzling. One potential explanation is methodological: only one item in the measure of appropriation (which we adopted from prior work for continuity, e.g., Mosley & Biernat, 2021; Reysen et al., 2012) used the word “appropriation,” while some of the other items were worded descriptively and could be interpreted as true across the Self-Promotion and Appreciation conditions. As such, the measure could have functioned partly like an evaluation of perceived cultural copying, which may not carry the moral weight of exploitation in participants’ minds that “appropriation” does (and to some, copying could even represent a form of flattery, e.g., Chesterton, 2020). In this light, it is less surprising that we observed only small effects of perpetrator intentions on this measure. Supporting this, when we re-ran analyses informally item by item, the item “[Target name] is displaying an element of culture that is not [his/her] own” consistently shows the smallest difference (if any) by condition, but the items “[Target name] is appropriating Black culture” and “[Target name] is taking from Black culture” (which seem more morally charged) tend to show larger differences.

The psychological study of cultural appropriation is still in its beginning stages. To our knowledge, only a handful of papers to date have investigated the topic empirically. Our research conceptualizes cultural appropriation as a phenomenon that touches on intergroup relations as well as moral psychology, helping to bridge these two subfields of psychological science. As we show in this work, perceivers’ racial group memberships influence the overall degree to which they perceive cultural copying as ethically problematic, although Black and White perceivers do not appear to differ systematically in their willingness to account for perpetrator intentions. By drawing attention to the ways in which moral judgment may or may not be shaped by perceiver identity, we hope to encourage further work bridging moral psychology and intergroup relations.

While the current research contributes significantly to our understanding of cultural appropriation as an intergroup moral phenomenon, there are several limitations that should be addressed in future research. One limitation concerns the possible range of intentions with which an individual might copy another culture, which can vary from benevolent (e.g., adopting another culture’s traditions in an attempt to show appreciation for the source community) to hostile (e.g., wearing a costume that evokes insulting stereotypes regarding the source community). For instance, someone intending to mock another culture may adopt caricatured elements of that culture or intentionally denigrate those cultural elements in a way that someone seeking to demonstrate appreciation would not do. As this example might suggest, the intentions underlying an instance of cultural copying can be difficult to separate from the actual details of the copying. Even though instances of hostile cultural copying are commonly treated as examples of cultural appropriation both colloquially (e.g., as in discussions of acceptable party costumes; Alvarez, 2022) and in the academic literature (e.g., Mosley et al., 2021; Mosley, Heiphetz et al., 2023), we omitted them in the present research because of the difficulty of isolating such an intention from the structure of the action, which would be necessary for a manipulation of intentions.

Another clear extension of the present work, and one that is in line with the aims of incorporating identity into moral psychology, is to include a broader range of identities in every aspect of research on cultural appropriation: participants, the targeted cultures, and the perpetrators. In this work, we focused on Black culture and White perpetrators because of the existence of other foundational work that adopted this focus (Mosley & Biernat, 2021) and the salience of Black–White racial dynamics in the United States. Although Black culture in the United States is certainly a frequent target of appropriation, it is one of many cultures (including Latine, Asian, and Indigenous cultures, plus the other groups within the African diaspora) whose cultural products are copied by dominant-culture members, and the relationship between each source community and its cultural products is likely to vary. Future research should investigate perceptions of appropriation from these cultures while also examining the perspectives of ingroup and outgroup members to test the generalizability versus heterogeneity of effects observed among Black and White individuals with respect to Black culture. In addition to the identities of participants and the appropriated culture, the identity of the perpetrator may also be important for morally relevant judgments. While Mosley and Biernat (2021) have shown that White and Black Americans agree that it is worse for White perpetrators to copy Black culture than it is for Black perpetrators to copy White culture, many other combinations of perpetrator and culture exist that have not been tested. For instance, promising work by Kirby et al. (2023) has shown that Black perceivers judge cultural copying by White and Asian appropriators more negatively than copying by Latine appropriators, suggesting that concerns over appropriation cannot be explained completely in ingroup–outgroup terms.

Conclusion

A rigorous study of cultural appropriation is important for understanding the conditions under which cultural exchange can occur equitably and consensually. To our knowledge, this is one of only a few papers to experimentally examine judgments of cultural appropriation, and among the first to explicitly examine it as a moral phenomenon. We contribute to the scientific body of knowledge about cultural appropriation by documenting the causal influence of information about perpetrator intentions and directly comparing the judgments of individuals from the perpetrator’s group and individuals from the appropriated culture. We find that cultural appropriation is like other moral phenomena in that judgments about it appear sensitive to perpetrator intent, but it is also like other discriminatory phenomena in that members of the perpetrator’s group perceive appropriation and harmful outcomes at lower levels than members of the targeted culture. With more research on intergroup moral phenomena, psychologists can continue to shed light on salient social issues while at the same time broadening our understanding of moral judgment to include the rich social context in which it typically occurs.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-gpi-10.1177_13684302261422600 – Supplemental material for “I thought I was appreciating”: The role of perpetrator intentions in perceptions of cultural appropriation

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-gpi-10.1177_13684302261422600 for “I thought I was appreciating”: The role of perpetrator intentions in perceptions of cultural appropriation by Shiri Spitz Siddiqi and Pia Dietze in Group Processes & Intergroup Relations

Footnotes

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Ethical approval

This research was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the University of California, Irvine (Protocol #1962).

Consent for publication

Not applicable

Informed consent statements

All participants in this project gave informed consent in accordance with the guidelines set forth by the Institutional Review Board at the University of California, Irvine.

ORCID iDs

Shiri Spitz Siddiqi

Pia Dietze

Data availability statement

All data, methodology files, and analysis scripts have been made publicly available on our OSF repository and can be accessed at https://osf.io/u4az2/. The designs, hypotheses, and analysis plan for all studies were preregistered (Study 1 at https:/osf.io/hpgdz, Study 2 at https://osf.io/84zy2, and Study 3 at ).

Supplemental material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

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