Abstract
A wealth of research has investigated how and why people cast blame. However, less is known about blame-shifting (i.e., blaming someone else for one’s own failures) and how exposure to a blame-shifting agent might lead to expectations that other agents will also shift blame. The present research tested whether exposure to a blame-shifting (versus responsibility-taking) agent would lead perceivers to expect a second, unrelated target to also shift blame. Contrary to our expectations, people expected greater blame-shifting after exposure to a responsible agent, particularly when perceivers were surprised by this reaction to failure. Discussion focuses on how people habitually expect some people to shift blame for their mishaps, and how expectancy violations when people act in unexpected ways predict the extent to which perceivers expect unrelated agents to also shift blame.
Highlights
“Men are only clever at shifting blame from their own shoulders to those of others.” -Titus Livius
We found that after exposure to an agent who acted counter-stereotypically, people expected a second agent to blame others for a failure even more than when they were exposed to an agent who blamed others, and that there was no mean difference in EBS for the second agent when comparing blame and control conditions
We examined the interaction of condition with surprise by the first agent’s actions to predict EBS for the second agent
Summary
Participants were again told that the purpose of the study was to pre-test materials for future research and were randomly assigned to a blame-shifting or responsibility-taking condition, where they were exposed to the same fabricated first article used in Experiment 1
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