Police Experience and Attribution of Personal Responsibility

Abstract

The sociogenic or sociological explanations of crime emphasize the strong role of environmental factors in the precipitation of crime (Gibbons, 1973) . Attribution theory (Jones & Davis, 1965) would lead one to expect that veteran police officers should be less likely than the average citizen to accept this view of criminal causation. The veteran police officer, having seen boch delinquent and nondelinquent individuals emerging from the same environments should be more prone to emphasize personal factors in the violations of normative behavior. This should lead him to hold others more personally responsible for their actions. Thircy police rookies without previous pol~ce experience and 30 police veterans with a t least 2 yr. active police experience (range = 2-24 yr., Mdn = 6.5 yr.) were administered 12 short scenarios. These reprcscnted an extended version of Heider's (1958) levels of responsibility (Whiteside, 1973) with scenarios at two outcome intensities (moderately bad or severely bad) for each of six levels of responsibility. Subjects were asked to decide how personally responsible the principal agent in the story was for the behavioral outcome. The resu!ts of an analysis of variance with repeated measures on outcome intensity and level of responsibility indicated that police veterans ( M = 24.26, SD = 11.99) rated (on a 41-point scale) others more personally responsible for their actions than did the rookies ( M = 21.67, SD = 11.44; F, .x = 7.09, p < .01) . Thus, the veteran appears less likely to accept the role of environmental factors in determining individual responsibility for an action. This conclusion is given additional support from the evidence that the veterans ( M = 36.40, SD = 7.50) were more harsh than rookies ( M = 31.28, SD = 12.60) in attributing personal responsibility for careless actions (F,.m = 5.22, P < ,025) and were also less likely ( M = 15.00, SD = 14.67) than rookies ( M = 10.52, SD = 13.55) to reduce personal responsibiliry when there were mitigating circumstances (F1., = 4.01, p < .05). A more detailed reporting of these and other findings will appear later.