Attribution Of Blame Research Articles

How do Blame Attributions Impact Trust in Complex Task Environments?

Trust in automation is a multidimensional process in predicting the proper use of automated systems. Trust can be generalized across components in multi-component systems, leading to contagion effects. However, no research has considered how blame attributions influence the size of contagion effects. We conducted an experiment to address how attributions of blame and responsibility influenced the magnitude of contagion effects for trust. Participants were presented with a hypothetical scenario depicting an airplane environment consisting of six human and six automation components. Participants rated their trust in each component before and after an oxygen mask failure. The findings indicate that the percentage of blame attributed to a component predicted the degree to that trust decreased following an error. Thus, more research should focus on how users assign blame across systems.

Who's to blame for failed integration of immigrants? Blame attributions as an affectively polarizing force in lay discussions of immigration in Finland

AbstractIncreasing expression of antagonism toward immigrants has turned immigration into one of the most polarizing issues in many countries, among them Finland, dividing people into those who favor and those who oppose immigration. But while affective polarization of the kind exemplified by widespread responses to immigration has recently received increasing attention from political psychologists, little attention has been paid to how affective polarization develops through the mutual reinforcement of opposing discourses. The application of critical discursive psychology to interviews with lay Finns reveals this mutual reinforcement in progress. In our interviews, Finns across the political spectrum construct five subject positions by attributing blame for immigration‐related challenges. Both sides blame some “other” for the challenges while exempting themselves from blame. Our study makes three contributions to political psychology: exploring how blame attribution helps to generate affective polarization, illustrating the ability of (critical) discursive psychology to illuminate processes of affective polarization in individuals, and bringing the concept of affective polarization drawn from survey research into dialogue with the concept of subject positions constructed by blame attribution drawn from discursive studies of populism.

Assessing attribution in the criminal behavior of mentally disordered offenders: Developing a Japanese version of the Gudjonsson Blame Attribution Inventory-Revised.

Treating individuals with a mental disorder and a history of criminal behavior (mentally disordered offenders [MDOs]) aims to enable patients to maintain their health and facilitate social rehabilitation while preventing adverse outcomes, such as violent recidivism or suicide. Understanding and responding to their own insight on their criminal behavior is crucial to achieving this goal. This article aims to develop a Japanese version of the Gudjonsson Blame Attribution Inventory-Revised (GBAI-R) and investigate the reliability and validity of the scale for MDOs in Japan. In addition to developing the Japanese version of GBAI-R (GBAI-RJ), psychological data relevant to the Japanese study were collected and analyzed. Factor analysis was employed. Seventy-seven Japanese native participants were recruited from forensic psychiatric inpatients, outpatients, and medical prison inmates between 2020 and 2022. The results demonstrated that the dimensions on the GBAI-RJ had a similar factor structure to those reported in previous studies. The GBAI-RJ has both test/retest reliability and internal consistency. The three dimensions Guilt Factor, External Factor, and Mental Element Factor from the original version in English are applicable to the Japanese version for assessing attribution and comparing the findings with those of the previous studies.

‘I’m Not Victim-Blaming, But . . .’: Young People’s Discourses in Understanding Sexual Violence Against Women

This article explores the discourses that young people (aged 18–24) in Ireland use in understanding men’s sexual violence against women (SVAW). Drawing on a two-part vignette used in interviews with young people to elicit a corpus of data, we deploy critical discourse analysis to unpack the nuanced argumentative structures, interpretive repertoires, and subject positions used in apportioning blame for SVAW. We find that when blame is placed solely on men as perpetrators, young people draw on critical discourses that recognise the socially constructed basis of SVAW. In contrast, those who in some way blame women for their victimisation draw on disclaimers and essentialist repertoires that discursively normalise SVAW. We also identify a ‘rights discourse’ that young people use in their attributions of blame and responsibility for SVAW.

Uncovering Hidden Anger in the Psalms Using Psychological Models of Anger

This article sets out to create a methodology for identifying anger in a biblical text using psychological models of anger rather than relying on explicit anger vocabulary. To do this, the article uses modern psychological research to define seven clear anger markers and show how these appear in a text like the Psalms. These markers are blocked goals, attribution of blame, approach motivation, vision of a way forward, entitlement, unmet expectations, and life stress. A selection of psalms, Pss. 60-80, are examined through the lens of these criteria to identify those psalms that contain subtle anger and those that do not.

Gendered Blame: Narratives of Participation in Genocide

This article draws upon interviews with 74 Rwandans to analyze how they explain civilian participation in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Specifically, we assess how Rwandans describe why men and women perpetrated genocide. We find that respondents commonly attribute men’s participation in the genocide to structural, external factors, such as government orders. However, respondents regularly attribute women’s participation to jealousy and other factors tied to their personalities. We also assess how the attribution of blame may impact the treatment of formerly incarcerated individuals, suggesting that gendered views of the women who committed genocide may hinder their reentry and reintegration.

An examination of the link between job content plateau and knowledge hiding from a moral perspective: The mediating role of distrust and perceived exploitation

This research aims to address the research question of how knowledge hiding occurs from an ethical lens. Drawing on an integrated ethical decision-making model, we identified job content plateau as an important personally threatening situation that predicts knowledge hiding. We also proposed that attribution of blame—a specific mechanism of moral disengagement—explains how employees experiencing a high job content plateau bypass their moral self-regulation to engage in knowledge hiding. More specifically, employees can cognitively reconstruct themselves as faultless victims who are driven to hide their knowledge because they perceive: (a) their colleagues cannot be trusted; and (b) the knowledge-exchange process in the organization is exploitative. We tested this dual-path mediation model using time-lagged data collected from 301 working adults across three time points. The results supported the mediating roles of perceived distrust in colleagues and perceived exploitation in the organization's knowledge-exchange process, opening the door for future research to better understand knowledge hiding from a moral perspective.

Diabetes stigma and weight stigma among physicians treating type 2 diabetes: Overlapping patterns of bias

AimsAdults with type 2 diabetes (T2D) report experiencing stigma across multiple settings, including stigmatizing interactions with their healthcare providers. However, research examining physician biases toward patients with T2D is scarce. Identifying stigma-related barriers in diabetes care is essential to prevent providers’ biases from impairing health care delivery. This study assessed attitudes towards individuals with T2D and obesity among physicians who treat T2D. Methods: Physicians specializing in internal medicine or endocrinology (n = 205) completed a series of online questionnaires assessing their attitudes towards patients with T2D and obesity, and their attributions of controllability and blame of individuals with T2D and obesity. Results: While 85% of physicians felt professionally prepared and confident to treat patients with T2D, 1/3 reported being repulsed by patients with T2D and view them as lazy (39%), lacking motivation (44%), and non-compliant with treatment (44%). Many witnessed professionals in their field making negative comments about patients with T2D (44%). Physicians endorsed worse levels of bias towards patients with obesity than T2D, but differences were small. ConclusionsFindings highlight the need for stigma reduction interventions for physicians addressing both T2D and obesity. Research assessing the effects of T2D stigma on quality of patient care and health outcomes is needed.

Boy v. man: The role of perception and the attribution of blame in court proceedings

Juries are a core component of the criminal justice system. Although marked with a history of prejudice, segmentation, and discrimination, the framework of the 6th Amendment calls for impartiality among a jury of peers who are selected for the pursuit of justice. Influencing jury decision-making is the perception of witnesses, defendants, and victims. Specific to this work, the characterization of the victim is often a function of in-group bias in which the jury, operating collectively, decides if it is to cognitively distance itself from the victim based on assigned attributes. The group's agreement with the assignment of negative attributes is especially apparent when the victim is a Black male. In the case of this analysis, teenage murder victim Jordan Davis was described as a man and characterized as an adult aggressor and deserving of blame. The analysis is integrative and considers this case to elaborate on the cognitive theories, system behavior, and cultural norms that frame the perceptive process of jurors. Also reflected are the implications of biased decision-making processes, as well as suggestions for ways to mitigate them.

Gender biases in attributions of blame for workplace mistreatment: a video experiment on the effect of perpetrator and target gender.

Ambiguous psychological workplace mistreatment such as insulting or ignoring a co-worker might trigger gender bias. This study aims to examine whether female perpetrators receive more moral anger and blame from observers than men. A sample of Austrian workforce members (n = 880, 55.00% women, 44.89% men, 0.11% diverse) responded to standardized videos showing a perpetrator's angry insult and a perpetrator's exclusion of a co-worker from lunch. In total, we edited 32 video clips with four female and four male professional actors. We manipulated the following variables: 2 perpetrator gender (male/female) * 2 target gender (male/female) * 2 types of mistreatment (insult/exclusion). As hypothesized, linear mixed-effects modeling revealed more moral anger and attributions of intent against female perpetrators than against men. Significant three-way interactions showed that female perpetrators were judged more harshly than men when the target was female and the mistreatment was exclusion. Female targets were blamed less when the perpetrator was female rather than male. Male targets did not evoke attributional biases. Observer gender had no significant interaction with perpetrator or target gender. Our findings suggest that gender biases in perpetrator-blaming are dependent on target gender and type of mistreatment. The stereotype of women having it out for other women or being "too sensitive" when mistreated by men requires more attention in organizational anti-bias trainings.

Variations in Women's Attribution of Blame for Sexual Assault.

In the United States, sexual assault (SA) is a significant problem that has adverse psychological impacts on women. Scholarship has shown that when survivors choose to disclose their experiences, the way their networks react has a powerful impact on their well-being, but literature on response to SA disclosure has not extensively explored variation among women, who are likely recipients of these disclosures. This study explored variation among perceptions of and blame attribution for SA within a geographically and politically diverse but primarily White sample of women. Participants were assigned one of four vignettes, each of which described a non-stereotypical SA. The vignettes differed in two ways: (1) the social status of the perpetrator of the assault and (2) the length of time the victim waited to report. Results showed that being older and more politically conservative was associated with assigning less blame to the perpetrator and more blame to the victim, but neither education level nor where the participant lived were linked with blame attribution. While women's own experiences of SA were unrelated to their responses, having a loved one who had experienced SA was associated with less victim blaming. With respect to attitudes, women endorsing higher levels of social dominance orientation (SDO) and sexism also reported higher levels of victim blame and lower levels of perpetrator blame. Further research should explore the role of specific personal experiences and knowledge of others' SA in assignment of blame, investigate the predictors and moderators of SDO, and should extend these findings to more racially/ethnically diverse samples of women.

Promising a Greener Paris: Anne Hidalgo’s Framing of Environmental Issues in Her Mayoral Campaigns

ABSTRACT Mayors are increasingly tackling environmental issues. To enact demonstrable change, however, mayors first need to be elected – leading one to question: How can a candidate create cohesive messaging on environmental issues and win? By content analyzing Anne Hidalgo’s successful 2014 and 2020 mayoral elections in Paris, this study seeks to illuminate potential environmental communication strategies for future candidates. Results revealed Hidalgo favored traditional environmental frames over alternate frames, treatment recommendations over blame attributions, and ecological solidarity frames. Further, Hidalgo employed gender adaptive strategies moving between elections, which enabled her to navigate gendered expectations in becoming Paris’s first female mayor.

The Italian adaptation of the Driving Anger Scale (DAS): examining measurement invariance and the role of blaming others as a mediator of the relationship between trait driving anger and aberrant driving behavior

High levels of trait driving anger have been linked to aberrant driving behavior and higher proneness to be involved in a car crash. In the present study, we assessed the psychometric properties of the Italian adaptation of the Driving Anger Scale (DAS) in a large (>2000; 72% males) sample of Italian drivers examining measurement invariance across gender and age. Also, we examined whether the association between trait driving anger and aberrant driving behavior is mediated by a maladaptive form of cognitive emotion regulation, namely blaming others. The results showed that the six-factor structure of the DAS was overall confirmed with a few variations compared to the original scale. Weak measurement invariance was supported across gender and age, while strong and strict invariance were partially confirmed. Finally, the tendency to cope with negative events by blaming others mediated the association between driving anger and aberrant driving behavior in the male but not in the female sample. For both men and women, however, blaming others was positively associated with violations. Thus, attributions of blame to others could be targeted by clinical interventions for high-anger drivers and driver education courses in the attempt to reduce aberrant driving behavior and improve road safety.

Blame attribution analysis of police motor vehicle collision reports involving child bicyclists

BackgroundInjuries resulting from collisions between a bicyclist and driver are preventable and have high economic, personal and societal costs. Studying the language choices used by police officers to describe factors...

Blaming yourself, your partner, or an unexpected event: Attribution biases and trust in a physical coordination task

AbstractAs robots enabled by artificial intelligence become more agentic, people may come to develop trust schemas based on a robot's actions and attribute blame to the robot as they would with a human partner. Trust and blame have yet to be investigated during dynamic physical coordination tasks despite the potential ramifications for manufacturing and service industries that could benefit from effective human–robot physical coordination. In anticipation of future human–robot work configurations, we developed a joint physical coordination task as a preliminary test environment for understanding trust and blame in a work partner. Fifty‐five participants were asked to jointly balance and transport a weighted box along a fixed path, and we used this test environment to evaluate the impact of a surprising event on trust in a work partner, and attribution of blame following a negative performance outcome. Results indicate that the group who experienced a surprising event compared to the group who did not trusted their partner more, but there was no difference in the attribution of blame to themselves, their partner, or to the surprising event. Conversely, the group who did not experience a surprising event tended to blame themselves for the negative outcome. These findings suggest that environmental uncertainty may prompt people's attribution of blame across multiple parties, including themselves. Moreover, people may build trust in work partners through the shared experience of surprising events. Future work would benefit from adopting our study design to investigate whether these findings are extendable to human–robot joint actors.

With great(er) power comes great(er) responsibility: an intercultural investigation of the effect of social roles on moral responsibility attribution

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the relevance of social roles and hierarchies for the attribution of blame and causation in five culturally different countries, namely China, Germany, Poland, the United Arabic Emirates, and the United States of America. We demonstrate that in all these countries, hierarchical differences between the social roles occupied by two agents and associated differences in duties to care for others affect how these two agents are morally and causally judged when they make a decision together. Agents higher in a hierarchy are attributed more blame and considered more causally responsible for an action’s consequences. We also demonstrate that the degree of this effect depends on culture-specific differences in how hierarchies are conceived.

Frustration and Anger Mitigation After Service Failure: The Effect of Other Consumer's Explanation and Employee's Explanation on Frustration and Anger After the Service Failure.

Based on the attribution and appraisal theories of emotion, this study investigates whether a consumer's frustration and anger after a service failure reduces in different ways after hearing explanations from different sources (other customer vs employee vs none) under different blame attribution circumstances (situational vs service provider), and its subsequent influence on complaining intention. In Study 1, valid data from 239 participants (46.9% female, Mage=35.6 years) were used to test the interaction effect of the explanation source and blame attribution on frustration and anger. In Study 2, using valid answers from 253 students at Korea University (57.9% female, Mage=20.9 years), Study 1 was replicated and, in addition, tested the moderated mediating impact on complaining intention. The overall theoretical model was tested with ANOVA and Hayes process model 8. When blame attribution was situational, the employee's explanation did not mitigate either frustration or anger, whereas the other customer's explanation mitigated frustration but not anger. In contrast, when blame attribution was towards the service provider, the employee's explanation mitigated both frustration and anger, whereas the other customer's explanation mitigated only frustration. In addition, the mitigation of frustration and anger by other customers subsequently led to a decrease in complaining intention, which was stronger and only significant when blame attribution was situational. However, only anger acted as a mediator between the employee's explanation and complaining intention, which did not vary according to blame attribution. The results of the study advance the current knowledge on informational support as a service recovery process by suggesting the crucial role of other consumers in mitigating the target customer's frustration, especially under situational service failure, which successively leads to a decrease in complaining intention, whereas the employee's explanation decreases complaining intention only through the mitigation of anger.

Who is to blame? Youth crime and attribution of responsibility in urban Mexico

Crime and violence threaten people's safety and overall well-being around the globe. Youths represent a large fraction of the victims and perpetrators of violent crime. Understanding how youths make judgments about criminal acts and attribute blame has important implications, as these patterns are associated with perceptions of the acceptability of criminal behavior. Drawing on standard theories of blame attribution, we investigate the causal attributions of responsibility for criminal behavior among youths in urban Mexico, distinguishing between internal blame (attributed to the perpetrator) and external blame (attributed to the government and society). Using a novel, face-to-face survey experiment with nearly 3000 Mexicans aged 16–29 and seven focus groups, we examine how the perpetrator's socioeconomic background, role within a gang, victim type, and crime severity influence assessments of blame attribution. Our results provide compelling evidence that the socioeconomic status of the perpetrator and the type of gang involvement significantly influence assessments of internal and external blame. We also find that blame allocation differs based on respondents' characteristics and community environment. These findings shed light on how youths rationalize criminal behavior and have clear implications for policy-relevant research concerning crime and violence among youths.

Hybrid regimes and narrative legitimacy during economic crises: Resiliency narratives of Egypt’s economic crisis

This study advances a theory of resiliency narratives to hybrid regimes by proposing a continuum mapping a democratic, hybrid and modern authoritarian narrative structure based on its directionality and informational content during economic crises. Using Egypt’s 2016 economic crisis as a case study, we examine Egyptian and Russian native language media reporting. The results show that Egyptian media provide coherent narratives of economic resiliency devoid of ideological messaging, with attribution of blame placed on domestic causes more than international, providing support to the hybrid regimes’ differentiated narrative structures.

Gunning for change: A content analysis of tweets following three mass shootings in the United States

ABSTRACT This study examined public comments on Twitter in the wake of three mass shootings in the United States during the summer of 2022. A total of 1,500 tweets were assessed (N = 1,500) for sentiment, risks presented, attribution of blame, and outrage. A sample of 500 tweets was taken following the Buffalo, New York, supermarket shooting; a sample of 500 tweets was taken following the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting; and a sample of 500 tweets was taken following the Highland Park, Illinois, Fourth of July parade shooting. Results show that risk, blame, and outrage differed significantly between the three situations in a variety of ways. These differences and possible reasons for them are further discussed. This study provides valuable insight on social media conversations about mass shootings – a timely subject that continues to plague the country and lead to polarizing opinions and divisiveness. The study also serves a practical function, as the findings can be presented to government organizations and social media organizations alike as critical insight into public perceptions, it can assist in identifying problematic speech online, and it can inform the development of social media guidelines in maintaining civil discord.