Attribution Of Blame Research Articles

Blame and obligation: The importance of libertarianism and political orientation in the public assessment of disinformation in the United States

AbstractDisinformation concerns have heightened the importance of regulating content and speech in digital communication environments. Perceived risks have led to widespread public support for stricter control measures, even at the expense of individual speech rights. To better understand these preferences in the US context, we investigate public attitudes regarding blame for and obligation to address digital disinformation by drawing on political ideology, libertarian values, trust in societal actors, and issue salience. A manual content analysis of open‐ended survey responses in combination with an issue salience experiment shows that political orientation and trust in actors primarily drive blame attribution, while libertarianism predominantly informs whose obligation it is to stop the spread. Additionally, enhancing the salience of specific aspects of the issue can influence people's assessments of blame and obligation. Our findings reveal a range of attributions, underlining the need for careful balance in regulatory interventions. Additionally, we expose a gap in previous literature by demonstrating libertarianism's unique role vis‐à‐vis political orientation in the context of regulating content and speech in digital communication environments.

Exploring the Factors Influencing Blame Attribution and Attitudes Toward Brands with COVID-19 Semantical Associations: A Study During the Lockdown Period

Exploring the Factors Influencing Blame Attribution and Attitudes Toward Brands with COVID-19 Semantical Associations: A Study During the Lockdown Period

Perceived government-expert discord and evaluation of COVID-19 policies in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT This study examines citizens’ retrospective evaluation of government policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. It focuses specifically on the impact of perceived government – expert discord, i.e. public perceptions of disagreement between government officials and the medical expert community. Medical experts played important roles during the pandemic and enjoyed high levels of credibility, whereas government leaders were sometimes seen as driven by political motivations. Hence, perceived government – expert discord might negatively affect policy evaluation. Analysis of a post-pandemic survey in Hong Kong (N = 1,002) shows that people who perceive significant government – expert discord are likelier to blame the government for negative happenings during the pandemic, less likely to credit the government for positive outcomes, and less likely to see the government’s control measures as appropriate. These relationships are stronger among people who suffered more, economically or mentally, during the pandemic. Credit attribution, blame attribution, and perceived appropriateness of control measures, in turn, influence overall policy evaluation.

Dynamics of COVID-19 blame attribution: A corpus-based analysis of readers’ comments in response to UK online news

This study adopts a longitudinal approach to analyse the attribution of blame in online comments for the emergence, continuation and consequences of COVID-19. It uses an innovative approach to distil a specialised corpus of readers’ comments in response to UK online news articles about COVID-19, before applying corpus linguistic techniques to identify the principal actors attributed as blame agents. The research found that both internal (the government and the prime minister) and external actors (China and the World Health Organization) were identified as blame agents in comments. The analysis also indicates the presence of blame attribution towards people, their own actions and behaviours, which, in part, may be a consequence of government and public health messaging that emphasised individual responsibility to reduce transmission of the virus. This is distinctive, with significance for public understanding of COVID-19 and for future pandemic communication planning.

Examining perceptions of blame and homophobia: the impact of sexual orientation on non-consensual intimate image dissemination

ABSTRACT Our aim was to investigate whether blame attribution toward same-sex victims compared to heterosexual victims of NCII and offense severity evaluation were associated with homophobic attitudes. Two-hundred-and-sixty men and women, who described themselves as heterosexual, were presented with vignettes depicting an NCII offense in which the intimate material was released by the victim’s ex-intimate partner. Victim’s and perpetrator’s sex were manipulated (i.e. gay, lesbian, heterosexual). We found that higher levels of homophobic attitudes were linked with lower severity attributions for same-sex perpetrator-victim pairs, but not for opposite-sex pairs. Additionally, higher levels of homophobic attitudes were associated with lower blame attributed to the perpetrator, but higher blame attributed to the victim. Sex differences were found, revealing that men tended to attribute higher blame to same-sex victims compared to heterosexual victims, whereas women showed no significant differences in blame attribution based on victim’s sexual orientation. Men also exhibited higher levels of homophobic attitudes than did women. The study reveals the impact of homophobic attitudes on blame allocation in NCII cases, emphasizing the need for targeted interventions to reduce victim-blaming and promote inclusivity. The role of technology in shaping behavior was also underscored, urging consideration of sex and sexual orientation in response strategies.

Who Does the Public Blame for Inequities in Public Service Provision? Examining the Effect of Contracting and Cost Information in a Survey Experiment

Research assessing blame attribution in third-party governance views public service performance as a function of efficiency and effectiveness but overlooks equity. We address this gap in the literature by asking two questions: (1) Does contracting out lessen the blame assigned to the government for inequitable service provision? and (2) Is the public less critical of inequitable service provision when told it results in greater efficiency? To answer these questions, a survey experiment was conducted using a representative sample of United States residents (n = 1034). The results show that, while the government still bears responsibility for inequitable service provision, contracting out diminishes some of the responsibility placed on the government, shifting it toward the contractor instead. In addition, citizens’ blame attribution patterns do not change when told inequitable service provision results from efforts to improve efficiency, which suggests that the public does not excuse inequitable service provision even when told it saves money. The findings of this study contribute to the understanding of blame dynamics in third-party governance and bring implications to democratic accountability.

Perspective-Taking Does Not Reduce Victim Blaming in Work-Related Situations

ABSTRACT According to the just-world theory, people tend to blame innocent victims for the misfortune they experienced to preserve the belief in a just world. Our preregistered experimental study (N = 404; a university participants pool) employed work-related scenarios to test the possibility of reducing victim-blaming by taking a victim’s perspective. We also explored whether “victim-blaming” occurs for both undeserved negative and positive outcomes, i.e. attributions of blame or virtue in scenarios including demotions, dismissals, public reprimands, and removal of responsibilities as negative outcomes; and bonuses, promotions, salary raises, and job hirings as positive outcomes. We found that victim-blaming followed from the just-world belief only in scenarios where an individual gains unjust benefit. The belief in a just world could thus lead to the misattribution of positive work outcomes and could result in biased human resources management. Taking the victim’s perspective did not reduce attributions of blame and virtue. However, participants considered the outcomes more deserved when they took the perpetrator’s perspective. This finding may be a warning that if a perpetrator’s perception framework is more accessible for assessing a particular situation, the victims will be blamed more.

“Industryimpactsmorethannature” - Risk perception of natural hazards in more-than-human worlds

Understanding the risk perceptions of natural hazards is vital for disaster mitigation. Despite extensive research on the topic, local and indigenous perspectives often remain marginalized and underrepresented. One reason discussed is the inherent Eurocentrism in knowledge production. Using narrative interviews with fishermen in the Patagonian fjord lands, we developed a grounded theory on risk perception against the background of actor–network theory to adress this criticism.The emergent order of risk perception research can be described by constructions of natural event systems, attributions of cause and blame, psychological processing and emotional strategies, territorial and professional identity, and perceptions of the national state. The distinction in risk science between natural hazards and environmental degradation, which represents the manifestation of the nature-culture divide, is not necessarily made by people.By allowing ambiguity in the ontology of nature, including networks of human and non-human actors,a hybrid understanding can be developed. We propose the following basic concepts of this understanding: environmental transformation, human-environment relations, appropriation of nature and ownership structure, displacement of sustainable traditions, and regional common-pool resources. Classifying these perspectives as pre-modern corresponds to the separation of different cultures described by Latour and forms the basis for asymmetrical relationships, reproducing the hegemony of Eurocentric and anthropocentric knowledge production. The separation into hazard and vulnerability can be seen as a manifestation of the second separation and leads to the networks of human and non-human actors that promote resilience being overlooked.

Trust in cervical screening and attributions of blame for interval cancers following a national controversy.

This study investigated levels of trust and attributions of blame in connection with a cervical screening programme following a controversy related to the programme's audit, incorporating an experimental test of the effectiveness of new information materials. We compared responses in Ireland (N = 872) to equivalent responses in Scotland (N = 400). Participants in Ireland were randomly assigned to either a treatment group that received the information materials or a control group that did not. Participants then responded to questions about their trust in cervical screening and to whom they would attribute blame in a range of scenarios describing women diagnosed with cervical cancer between screening rounds. Results showed that the control group in Ireland had lower trust and attributed higher blame towards screening services than participants in Scotland. However, exposure to information materials in the treatment group improved trust and reduced blame. The findings suggest that public controversies influence perceptions of screening programmes and underscore the importance of transparent, choice-based communication in mitigating these effects. The findings have valuable implications for screening services worldwide as all screening programmes will have associated false negative and false positive results.

Apologies, Remorse, and Amends: Empirical Legal Studies Across Domains and Disciplines

The role of apologies in law is offered as an example of a topic that cuts across legal fields, and one that is quintessentially interdisciplinary. Because apologies are an often-desired response in the wake of a wrongful act, they can be significant in many legal settings. Apologies or the lack thereof affect attributions of responsibility and blame, provide information, and alter relationships. Apologies play a role in motivating or forestalling legal action, shape settlement in civilcases, influence punishment in criminal cases, provide alternate or complementary means of accountability, and impact relations among parties to conflict from the interpersonal to the geopolitical. An understanding of apologies is enriched by research conducted by legal scholars, sociologists and psychologists, economists and political scientists, historians and linguists, and criminologists, using methods drawn from each of these fields. This range of empirical research is necessary to successfully develop a better understanding of the desire for, effects of, and limits of apologies across varied legal contexts and the implications for client counseling and legal strategy, for legal reform and systems design, for political decision making, and for procedural, restorative, and transitional justice.

No place to hide: The public attribution of responsibility for policy failures of international organisations

Abstract Who is held responsible when international organisations (IOs) fall short of public expectations? Scholarship on IO blame avoidance assumes that member states can hide behind IOs. As clarity of responsibility is assumed to be lacking in IOs, public responsibility attributions (PRA) will usually target the IO rather than individual member states. We argue, by contrast, that even in complex IOs such as the European Union (EU), clarity of responsibility is not always lacking. Therefore, whether the IO in general or individual member states become the main target of public blame attributions depends on the type of IO policy failure. In cases of failures to act and failures to comply, the responsibility of individual member states is comparatively easy to identify, and they thus become the main blame target. Only in cases of failures to perform clarity of responsibility is lacking, and the IO will become the main target of public blame attributions. To assess the plausibility of this‘failure hypothesis’, we study public blame attributions in two cases of EU foreign policy failures and two cases of EU environmental policy failures.

Online Criticism of Parents After Child Accidents: A Reflexive Thematic Analysis

Online Criticism of Parents After Child Accidents: A Reflexive Thematic Analysis

Counterfactuals in mainstream media: A pathway for blame attribution and policy endorsement in police lethal force incidents

AbstractPrevious research demonstrates that exposure to police lethal force through the media impacts individuals' support for police reform, but the mechanism driving this support is underexplored. The current study examines how news media counterfactuals (i.e., creating alternative outcomes for events that have already occurred) influence individuals' processing of police lethal force incidents, and how these perceptions, in turn, impact support for police reform. In a 2 (victim race: Black vs. White) × 3 (counterfactual target: victim, officer, or no counterfactual control) factorial design, 925 participants read a news article summarizing a lethal force incident, assigned blame for both the officer and victim, and reported their endorsement for various police reforms. Results indicated counterfactual target impacted blame attributions, and these blame attributions predicted endorsement of police reform while controlling for Attitudes Towards Police Legitimacy (APLS). These findings illustrate how media counterfactuals can influence blame, and importantly, influence perceptions of various police reforms.

The Risk Perception of the Chinese Diaspora during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Targeting Cognitive Dissonance through Storytelling.

The global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 required risk communications to mitigate the virus' spread. However, social media not only conveyed health information to minimize the contagion, but also distracted from the threat by linking it to an externalized 'other'-primarily those appearing to be of Chinese descent. This disinformation caused the attribution of blame to Chinese people worldwide. In Canada's Greater Toronto Area, Chinese individuals reported widespread public stigma that compounded their risk of contagion; to the degree that it was driven by cognitive dissonance, it generated experiences of social and cultural vulnerability. In this paper, we draw on the aforementioned study's findings to explain how the risk perception and threat appraisal of Chinese diaspora individuals were impacted by different cognitive dissonance pathways. These findings explore how storytelling is a viable intervention with which to target and mitigate cognitive dissonance. Indeed, the mechanisms of cognitive dissonance can modify risk perception and mitigate social and cultural vulnerability, thereby averting potential long-term negative consequences for one's mental health and well-being. We hope our guidance, training educators to target pathways of cognitive dissonance by drawing on storytelling (with humour), can assist them to better convey information in ways that are more inclusive during public health emergencies.

Disaster, Societal Responses, and State Legitimacy in Crisis in Vietnam

This article examines the role of celebrity activism in post-disaster politics in the context of state authoritarianism in Vietnam. In late 2020, a chain of violent tropical storms hit Vietnam’s central highland region – host to hundreds of hydropower dams – triggering severe landslides and floods that devastated human lives and local livelihoods. Drawing on data gathered through social media, online platforms, and interviews with non-governmental organisations and private sector actors, this article shows how the rupture of these disaster events facilitated socio-political openings in state–society relations that might otherwise have remained closed. It explores these political contestations, attributions of blame, and the competing recovery efforts that emerged between government actors, celebrities, and citizens. Public debates over the natural and political catalysts of the disaster revealed major structural and governance problems for the state, which allowed voluntary charity work by a celebrity to supplement state functions during the disaster. Considered illegal under state law, the article shows how support from the public and lower tiers of government for private charity work challenged state legitimacy. Under pressure from within and from citizens, the central government had to amend its policies to accommodate voluntary disaster relief – to restore its flagging legitimacy.

Does electoral behavior change after a protest cycle? Evidence from Chile and Bolivia

Can protests produce changes in electoral behavior? In this paper, we examine variations in voter turnout and electoral preferences at the local level after a protest cycle. Using data on protest occurrence during the 2019 social mobilizations in Chile and Bolivia and a difference-in-differences design, we assess the impact that street demonstrations had on voting behavior in the elections that took place the following year. We found that turnout was higher in municipalities that had protests, while the incumbent vote was lower. We argue that the effect on turnout is explained by the surge in political efficacy that emerged from the protests. Furthermore, we suggest that the protests enabled more effective blame attribution and heightened the salience of political issues, leading to changes in voter preferences. These results demonstrate the effect of protests on electoral dynamics, highlighting their role not only in mobilizing voters but also in shaping electoral preferences.

Fair or biased? A corpus-based study of Australia’s early COVID-19 media representation of China

ABSTRACT Given the surge in xenophobia faced by Chinese communities during the pandemic, there is a pressing need to delve into the concealed ideologies within public discourse that fuel discrimination. Against this backdrop, this study employs Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics to scrutinise the discursive construction and communication of China’s image in Australian print media during the early outbreak of COVID-19. The analysis uncovered recurrent negative depictions of the Chinese government, associating it with authoritarianism and responsibility for the pandemic. In the context of blame attribution and racialisation of COVID-19 terms, a counter-narrative was observed in Australian newspapers, reflecting journalistic efforts to present a balanced perception of China and to challenge the prevailing racialisation and discrimination. Furthermore, the study revealed Australian media’s focus on economic consequences over human losses during the early outbreak of this pandemic. That underscores China’s role as Australia’s indispensable economic partner. This research contends that the depiction of China in Australian news discourses during the COVID-19 pandemic is intertwined with historical tensions, bilateral relations, and journalistic efforts to counter prevailing biases.

The Effect of Information Exposure on Stigma Toward the COVID-19 Patient Mediated by Perceived Risk, Attribution of Blame and Protection Norm Conformity

ABSTRACT This study employed the model of stigma communication (MSC) to analyze how exposure to COVID-19-related information affected stigma-related information sharing about people who contracted COVID-19 during the pandemic and examined the cognitive process of the MSC in a collectivist culture. Based on a survey of 526 social media users during the COVID-19 pandemic in China, the study found that exposure to contact tracing information and pandemic control information had different impact on stigma-related information sharing through a series of cognitive variables. A dual-path model showed that perceived personal risk influenced stigma-related information sharing through attribution of blame toward the infected (the personal path), while perceived social risk influenced stigma-related information sharing through protection norm conformity (the social path). Compared to the personal path, the social path is more salient in shaping stigmatized attitudes and behaviors. The findings and discussions added to our understanding of the intricate stigma communication process in a collectivist culture.

Does blame always shift? A critical commentary

The manuscript is a critical commentary on the article ‘Does blame always shift? Examining the impact of workplace safety communication language on post-accident blame attributions for multiple entities’. In this commentary, I find that the reasoning provided for the non-shifting of blame across entities in the causal chain is not adequate. I use a zero-sum game analogy for blame attributions to provide evidence for this inadequacy. In this commentary, I further point out that the focal article does not account for the similarities and dissimilarities between the people making the attributions and the people against whom attributions are being made.

Discursive blame attribution strategies in migration news frames: How blame for perceived migration-related problems is mediated in journalistic framing

Public debates are rife with overt blame attributions—the explicit assignment of moral responsibility for problems in society to individuals and groups. The present study develops a framework for identifying discursive blame attribution strategies in the journalistic mediation of problems through the use of causality construction, which enables an understanding of how blame is attributed implicitly. I draw on a qualitative and quantitative discourse analysis of migration frames to distinguish three types of perceived migration-related problems: security-based, economic, and cultural. I make a further distinction based on whether these problems are causally explained by: (1) reference to migrants’ alleged culture and religion or (2) the socioeconomic conditions they experience in the recipient country. The study advances our understanding of blame attribution by drawing attention to the subtle ways groups are held responsible for problems in society through journalistic mediation processes and how context influences mediated blame attribution.