Moral Evaluations and Judgments of Responsibility

Abstract

There has been a failure to distinguish between moral evaluations and responsibility in the literature on moral judg- ment. Consequently, interpretive problems have occurred because the dependent measures of each have been discussed as if they were equivalent. An attempt was made in the present research to examine the comparability of moral evaluations and respon- sibility judgments. Factor analyses of the ratings of an ag- gression and an accident story by 94 women and 85 men revealed that moral evaluations (e.g. praise-blame) and responsibility judgments are distinct and cannot be interpreted interchangeably.