Abstract
Attributions of responsibility play a critical role in many group interactions. This paper explores the role of causal and counterfactual reasoning in blame attributions in groups. We develop a general framework that builds on the notion of pivotality: an agent is pivotal if she could have changed the group outcome by acting differently. In three experiments we test successive refinements of this notion – whether an agent is pivotal in close possible situations and the number of paths to achieve pivotality. In order to discriminate between potential models, we introduced group tasks with asymmetric structures. Some group members were complements (for the two to contribute to the group outcome it was necessary that both succeed) whereas others were substitutes (for the two to contribute to the group outcome it was sufficient that one succeeds). Across all three experiments we found that people’s attributions were sensitive to the number of paths to pivotality. In particular, an agent incurred more blame for a team loss in the presence of a successful complementary peer than in the presence of a successful substitute.
Highlights
Your football team has just lost an important match after the goalkeeper failed to save an easy shot
How much is the goalkeeper to blame for the team’s loss? Does it matter that the final score was 0–2, so that the goal in question did not affect the outcome of the match? Is the goalkeeper’s blame moderated by the fact that the forward in your team missed a penalty kick? Would it make a difference if you could know that the penalty kick would have been saved by the other team’s goalkeeper anyway?
Chockler and Halpern’s (2004) model predicts that responsibility attributions to each individual group member in the min condition decrease with the number of players who failed their task
Summary
Your football team has just lost an important match after the goalkeeper failed to save an easy shot. Responsibility attributions are determined by the number of changes that are required to be made in the actual situation in order to create a counterfactual situation in which the target individual would have been pivotal for the team outcome. In the max condition the best player in the team determined the team’s outcome These different causal structures have implications about the situations in which players are. Chockler and Halpern’s (2004) model predicts that responsibility attributions to each individual group member in the min condition decrease with the number of players who failed their task. For each additional player who failed in their task, one change would be required to render the target player pivotal and responsibility attributions are predicted to decrease This prediction coincides with the predictions of two other, non-causal explanations. We present the general framework and four models of responsibility before proceeding to describe the experiments
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