Responsibility, Helping, Aggression, and Evil

Abstract

Weiner reviews his own and others' work, which indicates that people who are attributed responsibility for their actions or outcomes (e.g., failure) receive different reactions than people who are not seen as responsible. People who are seen as responsible for their failure on a task are judged more harshly, and even evoke anger if they are seen as lazy rather than low in ability. A drunk person who falls down in the subway receives less help, presumably because he is seen as responsible for his need, than a person with a cane who falls down. (However, the cost of helping may also enter in this case.) Attributions about aggressive behavior also affect reactions to the aggressor. Greater intention to cause harm evokes stronger punitive reactions, for example, than greater harm caused (presumably within limits). Weiner proposes the perceptions of causal controllability as a key variable mediating between an event (state) and the elicited reaction. As he himself indicates, his basic point is quite familiar to psychologists and is part of the naive psychology of people in general. He suggests that the contribution of his article is the systematization of such knowledge, showing that these phenotypically diverse phenomena can be comprised within the identical theoretical framework. Among the issues his article raises is that of the moral meaning of responsibility attribution for the group. He stresses its positive value. People are kept accountable for their actions. Even the laziness of a person has broad social ramifications, affecting other members of the group.