Judgments Of Blame Research Articles

Negative Attribution Bias and Anger After Traumatic Brain Injury

Negative attributions pertain to judgments of intent, hostility, and blame regarding others' behaviors. This study compared negative attributions made by people with and without traumatic brain injury (TBI) and examined the degree to which these negative attributions predicted angry ratings in response to situations. Outpatient rehabilitation hospital. Forty-six adults with moderate to severe TBI and 49 healthy controls. Cross-sectional study using a quasi-experimental research design. In response to hypothetical scenarios, participants rated how irritated and angry they would be, and how intentional, hostile, and blameworthy they perceived characters' behaviors. There were 3 scenario types differentiated by the portrayal of characters' actions: benign, ambiguous, or hostile. All scenarios theoretically resulted in unpleasant outcomes for participants. Participants with TBI had significantly higher ratings for feeling "irritated" and "angry" and attributions of "intent," "hostility," and "blame" compared with healthy controls for all scenario types. Negative attribution ratings accounted for 72.4% and 65.3% of the anger rating variance for participants with and without TBI, respectively. People with TBI may have negative attribution bias, in which they disproportionately judge the intent, hostility, and blameworthiness of others' behaviors. These attributions contributed to their ratings of feeling angry. This suggests that participants with TBI who have anger problems should be evaluated for this bias, and anger treatments should possibly aim to alter negative attributions. However, before implementing clinical practice changes, there is a need for replication with larger samples, and further investigation of the characteristics associated with negative attribution bias.

Moral judgments of risky choices: A moral echoing effect

AbstractTwo experiments examined moral judgments about a decision-maker’s choices when he chose a sure-thing, 400 out of 600 people will be saved, or a risk, a two-thirds probability to save everyone and a one-thirds probability to save no-one. The results establish a moral echoing effect — a tendency to credit a decision-maker with a good outcome when the decision-maker made the typical choices of the sure-thing in a gain frame or the risk in a loss frame, and to discredit the decision-maker when there is a bad outcome and the decision-maker made the atypical choices of a risk in a gain frame or a sure-thing in a loss frame. The moral echoing effect is established in Experiment 1 (n=207) in which participants supposed the outcome would turn well or badly, and it is replicated in Experiment 2 (n=173) in which they knew it had turned out well or badly, for judgments of moral responsibility and blame or praise. The effect does not occur for judgments of cause, control, counterfactual alternatives, or emotions.

The Intention-Outcome Asymmetry Effect.

Knowledge of intention and outcome is integral to making judgments of responsibility, blame, and causality. Yet, little is known about the effect of conflicting intentions and outcomes on these judgments. In a series of four experiments, we combine good and bad intentions with positive and negative outcomes, presenting these through everyday moral scenarios. Our results demonstrate an asymmetry in responsibility, causality, and blame judgments for the two incongruent conditions: well-intentioned agents are regarded more morally and causally responsible for negative outcomes than ill-intentioned agents are held for positive outcomes. This novel effect of an intention-outcome asymmetry identifies an unexplored aspect of moral judgment and is partially explained by extra inferences that participants make about the actions of the moral agent.

The Blame Game: An investigation of Grammatical Aspect and Blame Judgments

Imperfective aspect (i.e., Mark was punching John) is interpreted by the language processing system as a dynamic, unfolding sequence of actions, whereas perfective aspect (i.e., Mark punched John) is interpreted as a complete whole. A recent study showed that grammatical aspect can influence perceptions of intentionality for criminal actions (Hart & Albarracín, 2011). The current study builds on this finding. Five experiments examine whether grammatical aspect can also influence perceptions of blame, a concept related to intentionality. There were no effects of grammatical aspect on judgments of blame but the results showed an effect of narrated order (Experiments 1–3). First-mentioned actions made the agent more to blame for the outcomes than last-mentioned actions. This effect was not due to the order of the blame questions (Experiment 2) or influenced by the chronological order of the events (Experiment 3). Experiments 4 and 5 showed strong effects of grammatical aspect on temporal dynamics and revealed an interesting new finding. Grammatical aspect can influence the mental representation of a non-mentioned action. We discuss our results in light of the current literature on grammatical aspect effects.

Two paths to blame: Intentionality directs moral information processing along two distinct tracks.

There is broad consensus that features such as causality, mental states, and preventability are key inputs to moral judgments of blame. What is not clear is exactly how people process these inputs to arrive at such judgments. Three studies provide evidence that early judgments of whether or not a norm violation is intentional direct information processing along 1 of 2 tracks: if the violation is deemed intentional, blame processing relies on information about the agent's reasons for committing the violation; if the violation is deemed unintentional, blame processing relies on information about how preventable the violation was. Owing to these processing commitments, when new information requires perceivers to switch tracks, they must reconfigure their judgments, which results in measurable processing costs indicated by reaction time (RT) delays. These findings offer support for a new theory of moral judgment (the Path Model of Blame) and advance the study of moral cognition as hierarchical information processing. (PsycINFO Database Record

An Introduction to the Moral Agency Scale

Abstract. The purpose of this research was to develop a psychometric measure of moral agency and explore its relationship with related moral constructs. Although our legal system, daily interactions with others, and most theories about moral psychology assume moral agency, few researchers have studied it, and there is no instrument devised to specifically measure it. Here, we present the Moral Agency Scale (MAS), a self-report instrument designed to assess the extent to which participants feel control over their moral choices. In Study 1, the MAS demonstrated strict factorial invariance; validity is further supported by its relations to similar constructs and reported volunteering behavior. In Study 2, MAS scores were associated with free will beliefs, moral disengagement, and judgments of moral blame. Results are discussed with reference to theory and future directions for research.

This Isn’t the Free Will Worth Looking For

According to previous research, threatening people’s belief in free will may undermine moral judgments and behavior. Four studies tested this claim. Study 1 used a Velten technique to threaten people’s belief in free will and found no effects on moral behavior, judgments of blame, and punishment decisions. Study 2 used six different threats to free will and failed to find effects on judgments of blame and wrongness. Study 3 found no effects on moral judgment when manipulating general free will beliefs but found strong effects when manipulating the perceived choice capacity of the judged agent. Study 4 used pretested narratives that varied agents’ apparent free will and found that perceived choice capacity mediated the relationship between free will and blame. These results suggest that people’s general beliefs about whether free will exists have no impact on moral judgments but specific judgments about the agent’s choice capacity do.

Interpersonal Blame and Perceptions of Choice

Blame judgments may be impacted by choice at both a situational level (through vignette manipulation) and an individual level (assessments of attitudes). College students, 264 women and 73 men, from a central Texas university read one of six vignettes describing a target individual, a freshman student having academic problems, and completed free will and agency attitude items. Vignettes manipulated choice wording (made a choice, no choice, or neutral) and target’s background (inner city or advantaged). Greater blame was associated with a privileged background and with a choice mindset, but not with individual-level assessments for free will and agency. Perhaps using choice wording and describing a wealthier background leads to the perception that target individuals “could have done otherwise,” resulting in more blame.

Blame, not ability, impacts moral “ought” judgments for impossible actions: Toward an empirical refutation of “ought” implies “can”

Recently, psychologists have explored moral concepts including obligation, blame, and ability. While little empirical work has studied the relationships among these concepts, philosophers have widely assumed such a relationship in the principle that “ought” implies “can,” which states that if someone ought to do something, then they must be able to do it. The cognitive underpinnings of these concepts are tested in the three experiments reported here. In Experiment 1, most participants judge that an agent ought to keep a promise that he is unable to keep, but only when he is to blame for the inability. Experiment 2 shows that such “ought” judgments correlate with judgments of blame, rather than with judgments of the agent’s ability. Experiment 3 replicates these findings for moral “ought” judgments and finds that they do not hold for nonmoral “ought” judgments, such as what someone ought to do to fulfill their desires. These results together show that folk moral judgments do not conform to a widely assumed philosophical principle that “ought” implies “can.” Instead, judgments of blame play a modulatory role in some judgments of obligation.

The morality of action: The asymmetry between judgments of praise and blame in the action–omission effect

Actions leading to negative outcomes (i.e., harm) are seen as more blameworthy than omissions of actions leading to the same negative outcomes. However, whether a similar action–omission effect applies to judgments of praiseworthiness of positive outcomes is still an open question. Drawing on positive–negative asymmetries found in other domains, we hypothesized that positive events would not elicit an action–omission effect for judgments of praise, because such positive events do not by default trigger the causal appraisal processes that are central to the action–omission effect. Furthermore, we posited that when people are explicitly asked to consider causality before or during the judgment, an action–omission effect on judgments of praise could be obtained too. These hypotheses were verified in three independent studies and a meta-analytic analysis. As such, the present set of studies provides novel insights in the action–omission effect's asymmetry for negative and positive outcomes, as well as an increased understanding of the role of causality appraisal in this effect: judgments of praise are less reliant on causal reasoning than judgments of blame, and therefore also less susceptible to the action–omission bias.

Jurors’ Emotions and Judgments of Legal Responsibility and Blame: What Does the Experimental Research Tell Us?

Jurors’ emotions, both integral and incidental, can affect their attributions of legal responsibility and blame in several, sometimes complexly interrelated ways. The article reviews the experimental research, outlining the multiple paths of emotional influence, and explains why identifying them is worthwhile. It then discusses why the modest to moderate effect sizes found in the research may understate emotions’ actual influence in some cases yet overstate it in others, and discounts moral intuitionism as a reason for believing that emotional influences in real cases are stronger than the experimental data indicates. The article concludes with recommendations for further research.

Inability and Obligation in Moral Judgment.

It is often thought that judgments about what we ought to do are limited by judgments about what we can do, or that “ought implies can.” We conducted eight experiments to test the link between a range of moral requirements and abilities in ordinary moral evaluations. Moral obligations were repeatedly attributed in tandem with inability, regardless of the type (Experiments 1–3), temporal duration (Experiment 5), or scope (Experiment 6) of inability. This pattern was consistently observed using a variety of moral vocabulary to probe moral judgments and was insensitive to different levels of seriousness for the consequences of inaction (Experiment 4). Judgments about moral obligation were no different for individuals who can or cannot perform physical actions, and these judgments differed from evaluations of a non-moral obligation (Experiment 7). Together these results demonstrate that commonsense morality rejects the “ought implies can” principle for moral requirements, and that judgments about moral obligation are made independently of considerations about ability. By contrast, judgments of blame were highly sensitive to considerations about ability (Experiment 8), which suggests that commonsense morality might accept a “blame implies can” principle.

Race and SES Interact to Influence Blame Judgments

Both black juveniles and low-socioeconomic status (SES) juveniles are disproportionately represented in the U.S. legal system, yet minimal experimental work has addressed how race and SES might interact when predicting potential jurors’ judgments about juvenile guilt, blame, and punishment. Across two vignette experiments (N = 799) that varied a juvenile defendant’s race (black or white) and SES (low or high), we found that race and SES interacted such that low-SES black and high-SES white juveniles tended to be judged as more guilty, more blameworthy, and more deserving of punishment than their high-SES black and low-SES white counterparts. Moreover, perceptions of the juveniles’ likelihood of recidivism, past criminality, and character may mediate these effects. These perhaps surprising results add to a growing body of literature suggesting that stereotypes or other irrelevant factors may influence blame judgments and have important implications for the justice system.

Jurorss Emotions and Judgments of Legal Responsibility and Blame: What Does the Experimental Research Tell Us?

Jurors’ emotions, both integral and incidental, can affect their attributions of legal responsibility and blame in several, sometimes complexly interrelated ways. The article reviews the experimental research, outlining the multiple paths of emotional influence, and explains why identifying them is worthwhile. It then discusses why the modest-to-moderate effect sizes found in the research may understate emotions’ actual influence in some cases yet overstate it in others, and discounts moral intuitionism as a reason for believing that emotional influences in real cases are stronger than the experimental data indicates. The article concludes with recommendations for further research.

Reversal of Fortune: When Does Increased Distance from an Initial Negligent Act Make One More Blameworthy?

Early investigations into the effect of distance between negligent acts and subsequent harm demonstrated a causal proximity bias in judgments of blame. Specifically, fewer mediating steps between a negligent act and subsequent harm resulted in more blameworthy defendants. However, we reasoned that sometimes extra steps in a causal chain could be viewed as additional opportunities for the defendant to intervene and prevent a harmful outcome. Therefore, extra steps, or increased causal distance, without intervention by the defendant would make the defendant seem more blameworthy. Across three studies (N = 338), we demonstrated that although reversing the causal proximity bias is relatively easy, obtaining the original causal proximity bias is surprisingly difficult. We argue that increasing the number of causal steps to an outcome can be perceived as missed opportunities for the perpetrator to take corrective action. Therefore, the more steps to an outcome, the more blameworthy a defendant is judged.

Manipulating Morality: Third-Party Intentions Alter Moral Judgments by Changing Causal Reasoning.

The present studies investigate how the intentions of third parties influence judgments of moral responsibility for other agents who commit immoral acts. Using cases in which an agent acts under some situational constraint brought about by a third party, we ask whether the agent is blamed less for the immoral act when the third party intended for that act to occur. Study 1 demonstrates that third-party intentions do influence judgments of blame. Study 2 finds that third-party intentions only influence moral judgments when the agent's actions precisely match the third party's intention. Study 3 shows that this effect arises from changes in participants' causal perception that the third party was controlling the agent. Studies 4 and 5, respectively, show that the effect cannot be explained by changes in the distribution of blame or perceived differences in situational constraint faced by the agent.

The Social Explanatory Styles Questionnaire: assessing moderators of basic social-cognitive phenomena including spontaneous trait inference, the fundamental attribution error, and moral blame.

Why is he poor? Why is she failing academically? Why is he so generous? Why is she so conscientious? Answers to such everyday questions—social explanations—have powerful effects on relationships at the interpersonal and societal levels. How do people select an explanation in particular cases? We suggest that, often, explanations are selected based on the individual's pre-existing general theories of social causality. More specifically, we suggest that over time individuals develop general beliefs regarding the causes of social events. We refer to these beliefs as social explanatory styles. Our goal in the present article is to offer and validate a measure of individual differences in social explanatory styles. Accordingly, we offer the Social Explanatory Styles Questionnaire (SESQ), which measures three independent dimensions of social explanatory style: Dispositionism, historicism, and controllability. Studies 1–3 examine basic psychometric properties of the SESQ and provide positive evidence regarding internal consistency, factor structure, and both convergent and divergent validity. Studies 4–6 examine predictive validity for each subscale: Does each explanatory dimension moderate an important phenomenon of social cognition? Results suggest that they do. In Study 4, we show that SESQ dispositionism moderates the tendency to make spontaneous trait inferences. In Study 5, we show that SESQ historicism moderates the tendency to commit the Fundamental Attribution Error. Finally, in Study 6 we show that SESQ controllability predicts polarization of moral blame judgments: Heightened blaming toward controllable stigmas (assimilation), and attenuated blaming toward uncontrollable stigmas (contrast). Decades of research suggest that explanatory style regarding the self is a powerful predictor of self-functioning. We think it is likely that social explanatory styles—perhaps comprising interactive combinations of the basic dimensions tapped by the SESQ—will be similarly potent predictors of social functioning. We hope the SESQ will be a useful tool for exploring that possibility.

Blame, Cause and Counterfactuals: The Inextricable Link

In this response to Malle, Guglielmo, and Monroe's (2014) proposed theory of blame, we argue that blame judgments may be part of a dynamic, bi-directional, iterative process that depends on counterfactual thinking and causal reasoning.

A Theory of Blame

We introduce a theory of blame in five parts. Part 1 addresses what blame is: a unique moral judgment that is both cognitive and social, regulates social behavior, fundamentally relies on social cognition, and requires warrant. Using these properties, we distinguish blame from such phenomena as anger, event evaluation, and wrongness judgments. Part 2 offers the heart of the theory: the Path Model of Blame, which identifies the conceptual structure in which blame judgments are embedded and the information processing that generates such judgments. After reviewing evidence for the Path Model, we contrast it with alternative models of blame and moral judgment (Part 3) and use it to account for a number of challenging findings in the literature (Part 4). Part 5 moves from blame as a cognitive judgment to blame as a social act. We situate social blame in the larger family of moral criticism, highlight its communicative nature, and discuss the darker sides of moral criticism. Finally, we show how the Path Model of Blame can bring order to numerous tools of blame management, including denial, justification, and excuse.

Immorality or Abnormality: What's to Blame for Increasing Blame?

A growing body of research shows that immoral actors are judged to be more causal of and more blameworthy for bad outcomes. Prior research suggests that the immorality-blame link is a product of top-down processing, in which automatic judgments about an actor’s morality influence later cause and blame judgments. We, however, suggest that immorality is typically correlated with abnormality, and what appears to be a relationship between morality and blame is due at least in part to the relationship between normality and cause. Study 1 provides evidence that judgments of morality and normality are typically correlated. Studies 2 and 3 replicate this finding and also show that that normality mediates the relationship between morality, causation, and blame. Study 3 also provides evidence for why abnormal behavior affects blame judgments. Specifically, immoral behavior, because it is abnormal, prompts counterfactual thinking – i.e., imagining ways a bad outcome could have been prevented – and such thinking in turn affects cause and blame judgments. These findings support a bottom-up, probabilistic process of cause and blame assignment. They also conflict with prescriptive theories of blame and have applied implications for legal policy.