Stage 1 Registered Report: How responsibility attributions to self and others relate to outcome ownership in group decisions.

Matt Jaquiery,Marwa El Zein

doi:10.12688/wellcomeopenres.16480.1

Abstract

Responsibility judgements have important consequences in human society. Previous research focused on how someone's responsibility determines the outcome they deserve, for example, whether they are rewarded or punished. Here, we investigate the opposite link: How outcome ownership influences responsibility attributions in a social context. Participants in a group of three perform a majority vote decision-making task between gambles that can lead to a reward or no reward. Only one group member receives the outcome and participants evaluate their and the other players' responsibility for the obtained outcome. Two hypotheses are tested: 1) Whether outcome ownership increases responsibility attributions even when the control over an outcome is similar. 2) Whether people's tendency to attribute higher responsibility for positive vs negative outcomes will be stronger for players who received the outcome. The findings of this study may help reveal how credit attributions can be biased toward particular individuals who receive outcomes as a result of collective work.

Highlights

How we judge people’s responsibility for the outcomes of their actions has important consequences in our society
Responsibility judgements are tightly related to whether people get rewarded or blamed for the actions they make[1,2], which is crucial for the maintenance of a cooperative and fair society
Whether in the workplace or with our family and friends, responsibility for outcomes is shared among several individuals because these outcomes stem from collective decisions

Summary

Introduction

How we judge people’s responsibility for the outcomes of their actions has important consequences in our society. We would like to address 1) whether outcome ownership changes attributions of responsibility, and 2) whether outcome ownership is necessary for the self-serving and/or other-serving bias (more responsibility for positive versus negative outcomes) to appear. We investigate this question in a group decision-making context, where only one member receives the outcome in each round. Participants will perform an online task where they make collective decisions through majority votes, one member of the group receives either a reward or no reward They rate the responsibility of all group members for the positive or negative outcome. The work here investigates how observing a person getting an outcome can change responsibility attributions, possibly explaining how particular people may end up receiving all the credit for a collective work, both in their own eyes and others’

Methods

Frith CD

Guerin B

22. R Core Team