Judgments Of Responsibility Research Articles

Lazy, Dumb, or Industrious: When Stereotypes Convey Attribution Information in the Classroom

Historically, ethnic minority children and girls have underachieved in American schools. This paper examines the role that stereotypes play in imposing obstacles to success for stigmatized children inside and outside of the classroom. Stereotypes convey explanatory information about groups—such as blacks are lazy, girls are bad at math, and so forth—that may be used as attributions for performance by adults as well as the children themselves. This paper presents a model that brings to light the underlying attributional structures of all stereotypes. Each of these attributional signatures has specific effects on judgments of responsibility and deservingness, help giving or punishment, self-esteem and motivation, and even performance inside and outside of the classroom. Through recognizing that stereotypes are vehicles for attributional judgments, educators are better able to anticipate the effects that stereotypes may have on students and take measures to counteract or diminish them.

RESPONSIBILITY AS A PREDICTOR OF ECOLOGICAL BEHAVIOUR

How responsible a person feels for the environment is a promising predictor of that person's ecological behaviour. One difficulty of using responsibility feelings as a predictor is that people can feel either morally or conventionally responsible. Moral responsibility feelings depend on a person's self-ascribed responsibility (i.e. a deliberate responsibility judgement) and guilt feelings. Conventional responsibility feelings depend on the social expectations a person is aware of and his or her readiness to fulfill these expectations. In a survey study of 445 members of two Swiss transportation associations, the relative influence of these distinguishable responsibility concepts on ecological behaviour was assessed.Structural equation analyses revealed that people apparently feel morally responsible rather than conventionally responsible for the environment. Guilt feelings explain 44 per cent of the variance of these responsibility feelings, which, in turn, explain 45 per cent of the variance of a person's deliberately made responsibility judgement, which, in turn, predicts 55 per cent of the variance of a person's ecological behaviour. These results suggest that if people feel guilty for what they do or fail to do, they also feel morally responsible for the environment. This promotes their self-ascription of responsibility and it is this judgement that predicts a considerable portion of a person's ecological behaviour.

Book Reviews

Books reviewed:Deborah Welch Larson, Anatomy of Mistrust: U.S. Soviet Relations During the Cold WarM. Rejai and K. Phillips, with W. L. Mason, Demythologizing an Elite: American Presidents in Empirical, Comparative, and Historical PerspectiveDaniel Chirot and Anthony Reid (eds.), Essential Outsiders: Chinese and Jews in the Modern Transformation of Southeast Asia and Central EuropeC. N. Macrae, C. Stangor, and M. Hewstone (eds.), Stereotypes and StereotypingKenneth R. Hammond, Human Judgment and Social Policy: Irreducible Uncertainty, Inevitable Error, Unavoidable InjusticeBlema S. Steinberg, Vamik D. Volkan, Normal Itzkowitz, and Andrew W. Dod, Shame and Humiliation: Presidential Decision Making on Vietnam and Richard Nixon: A PsychobiographyHugh Gusterson, Nuclear Rites: A Weapon Laboratory at the End of the Cold WarWolfgang Mieder, The Politics of Proverbs: From Traditional Wisdom to Proverbial StereotypesDiana C. Mutz, Paul M. Sniderman, and Richard A. Brody, Political Persuasion and Attitude ChangeDaniel Bar‐Tal and Ervin Staub (eds.), Patriotism in the Lives of Individuals and NationsRobert S. Robins and Jerrold M. Post, Political Paranoia, the Psychopolitics of HatredBernard Weiner, Judgments of Responsibility: A Foundation for a Theory of Social ConductAvner Falk, A Psychoanalytic History of the JewsBarbara Rearden Farnham, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Munich CrisisH. D. Forbes, John Daniel Cash Ethnic Conflict: Commerce, Culture and the Contact Hypothesis and Identity, Ideology and Conflict: The Structuration of Politics in Northern Ireland

Crash Responsibility Versus Drug and Alcohol Use Among Fatally Injured and Hospitalized Motor Vehicle Drivers in Sweden

The present study was aimed at determining whether drivers testing positive for drugs and/or alcohol were more often responsible for the crash than the test-negative ones. Data on 241 fatally injured and 102 hospitalized motor-vehicle drivers was collected in Northern and Western Sweden. Blood samples were taken from these drivers and screened for the presence of alcohol, licit drugs, and illicit drugs. A judgment of responsibility, and assessment of the traffic situation and crash characteristics were based on police reports. Alcohol-positive drivers (n = 49) were more often (96% vs. 70%, p < 0.0001) judged to be responsible for the crash than test-negative drivers. Ninety-three percent of the drug-positive drivers were judged to be responsible, but they were not significantly more often responsible than the test-negative drivers. Drug-positive drivers differed from the alcohol-positive drivers in that they more often crossed over to the wrong side of the road and crashed into an oncoming vehicle. The findings support previous studies that reducing the number of drug-positive drivers in traffic is bound to lead to a reduction in crashes resulting in injury. Further analysis with a larger sample is needed to elucidate the association between crash responsibility and drugs other than alcohol.

Reexamining Bases of Power From an Attributional Perspective1

Four replications of Rodrigues' (1995) study on genotypical similarities of Raven's (1965) power taxonomy are reported. Rodrigues found that compliance induced by reward, informational, and referent power is perceived as more internal and controllable than compliant behavior induced by expert, legitimate, and coercive power. The replications included 4 new aspects: (a) subjects are highly ego‐involved in the hypothetical situation presented; (b) subjects are actors rather than observers; (c) subjects are from another culture; and (d) subjects are asked to play the role of a supervisor and apply sanctions to the person who complied as a result of the influence attempt, thus affording an empirical testing of Weiner's (1995) thought‐affect‐action sequence when responsibility judgments are made. The results of all 5 studies, with a total of 570 subjects, support Rodrigues' (1995) findings and confirm Weiner's (1995) hypothesis

Judging deservingness and affect in relation to another's employment or unemployment: a test of a justice model

In a study that was based on a structural model of deservingness, 24 male and 80 female undergraduate students responded to scenarios in which either a liked or disliked unemployed stimulus person expended either high or low effort and then either obtained employment or remained unemployed. Results showed that, when the outcome was employment, judgements of responsibility, deservingness, and pleasure about the successful outcome were higher when the stimulus person expended high effort rather than low effort. When the outcome was unemployment, judgements of responsibility, deservingness, and reported pleasure about the unsuccessful outcome were higher when the stimulus person displayed low effort rather than high effort in seeking a job and participants reported feeling less sympathetic and more annoyed with the stimulus person and less inclined to provide financial assistance. Liking relations had most effects in the employed condition. The employed outcome elicited more reported pleasure and less resentment for the liked stimulus person and he or she was judged to be more responsible for and more deserving of employment than the disliked stimulus person. The results were discussed in relation to component balanced and unbalanced structures within the structural model and they also suggested some elaboration of the responsibility variable. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Cultural Factor in Lay Perception of Jealousy as a Motive for Wife Battery1

Cultural psychology is concerned with the comparative study of the way culture and psyche shape each other: This process is particularly well illustrated in the social construction of some feelings. Although sexual jealousy seems to be universal, people differ in the intensity of their reactions and in the type of stimuli perceived as threatening. Replicating previous research in Britain by Delgado and Bond (1993), a questionnaire research survey was conducted in Spain to determine if lay perception considers jealousy a justification for wife battery. The comparison of results shows striking differences: The harmdoer was seen as more guilty in Britain and the victim was seen as more guilty in Spain. Results demonstrate cultural differences in the perception of jealousy; when jealousy is a motive for assault, there are also cultural differences in judgments of responsibility. Emotions function differently in different cultures regarding perceived causes and justification for conduct.

Political Ideology and Popular Beliefs about Class and Opportunity: Evidence from a Survey Experiment

This paper examines popular understanding of class inequalities in opportunity using an experimental approach to assess implicit as well as explicit comprehension. Three competing representations of popular beliefs are compared: a 'class inequality' model, implying widespread belief in class-related inequalities of opportunity; a 'meritocratic' view of achievement, in which emphasis is placed on individual responsibility; and an 'ideological polarization' model, which assumes that beliefs emphasizing class inequality or merit vary with left-right ideology. Predictions derived from these ideas are tested using a national survey with an experimental design, in which respondents are presented with vignettes designed to elicit their beliefs as to how and why people from different class backgrounds obtain middle-class or working-class occupations. As predicted by the class inequality model, there is clear evidence of the impact of tacit assumptions about class structured inequality of opportunity on expectations, judgments of responsibility and explanations of occupational attainment. Even among right-wing respondents, who are more likely to endorse the rhetoric of individual responsibility, there remains an implicit awareness of social class influences on life-chances, suggesting the pervasive presence of these beliefs in popular understanding of social processes.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The impact of the activation of positive and negative components of an ethnic stereotype on judgments of responsibility for both positive and negative stereotypic behaviors was considered. Overall, stereotype activation biased judgments in a stereotype‐consistent manner, across both positive and negative scenarios. Generalization of these judgments to more global trait perceptions of the target was limited to the negative scenario. Results are discussed in terms of both the use of stereotypes as inferential shortcuts and in‐group favoritism mechanisms.

Responsibility and Planning

We are planning agents and we are, or so we suppose, responsible agents. How are these two distinctive aspects of our agency related? In his "Freedom and Resentment" Peter Strawson understands responsible agency in terms of "reactive attitudes" like resentment and gratitude, attitudes which are normally embedded in "ordinary inter-personal relationships." I draw on Strawson's account to sketch an answer to my question about responsibility and planning. First, the fact that an action is plan-embedded can influence the agent's degree of culpability for that action; for such embeddings can constitute or indicate important facts about the quality of the agent's will. Second, general planning incapacities can to some extent exempt an agent from normal judgments of responsibility. My argument for this second claim appeals to the normal roles of planning in "ordinary inter-personal relationships."

Sufficient Grounds for Optimism?: The Relationship Between Perceived Controllability and Optimistic Bias

Evidence that perceived controllability is associated with optimistic bias is reviewed. There is sufficient evidence that people are optimistically biased about negative events they perceive to be controllable. More work is needed to establish whether this is also true of positive events. There is evidence also that people often hold beliefs of their personal superiority on control-related dimensions. More experimental studies testing hypotheses about the mechanisms linking perceived control and optimistic bias are required. Future work should also expand the sophistication with which control is treated conceptually and empirically and the range of potential mechanisms examined.

Corporate Crime through Citizens' Eyes: Stratification and Responsibility in the United States, Russia, and Japan

A citizen's judgment of wrongdoing in an organizational setting may depend on characteristics of the citizen, of the accused, or both. In 1993, random sample surveys exploring judgment of corporate wrongdoing were carried out in Washington, DC (N = 602), Tokyo, Japan (N = 600), and Moscow, Russia (N = 597). Respondents heard hypothetical vignettes about wrongdoing in organizations and were asked to judge the actor's responsibility and related issues; they also provided demographic information and recounted their attitudes toward corporations. Education was more powerfully related than social class to responsibility judgments. In the United States, education's effects on responsibility were indirect, operating through attitudes toward obedience and toward corporate accountability. Russian and Japanese results were unmediated by attitudes. It appears that responsibility is primarily a function of sociolegal factors (such as aspects of the case) and secondarily a function of social characteristics and the sense of similarity or difference they engender. The article concludes by discussing general issues in accountability within corporate settings across cultures.

Social Judgments of Responsibility in Elder Self-Neglect Cases

Abstract In this study, 1,038 case judgments made by 26 adult protective service (APS) workers in the United States were examined using hypothetical elder self-neglect vignettes. The independent variables used to construct realistic vignettes were based on the relevant literature, the law in the jurisdiction being studied, and other practical considerations. The factorial survey method was used in the vignette construction phase, and multiple regression was used for analysis. The independent variables of age, household income, disability, family presence and involvement, and the form and consequence of the self-neglect revealed statistically significant findings, but the main effect rested with the social perception of disability in assigning responsibility. Over 25% of the variance was explained in the model, the majority of which could be attributed to the victim's disability. The findings indicate that judgment of responsibility was almost entirely due to the perception of the victim's disability. Resp...

Thematic Structure of Descriptions of Violent Events Influences Perceptions of Responsiility:

To examine the influence of the thematic structure of descriptions of interaction on observers' perceptions of responsibility, subjects read a story about a victim-assailant interaction and then wrote out their reactions. Either victim or assailant was thematic and scenario content was held constant. A thematic structure effect was predicted: Subjects would write first about, write more about, and express more extreme judgments of responsibility about the thematic target. Reactions to an incident of wife abuse were generally consistent with predictions. Contrary to predictions, 18% of the subjects wrote as much about the nonthematic as about the thematic target. The manipulation of theme did not significantly affect the proportion of statements about victim-negative or assailantmitigated responsibility Several explanations advanced to account for the deviant findings were tested in a second study. The results were as predicted. Implications for victim blaming and the importance of language in social life are discussed.

Moral Realism in Adults' Judgments of Responsibility

Abstract To explore the occurrence of moral realism in the moral practice of adults, students were asked to respond to storylines describing an actor, child or adult, involved in an action leading to slight or severe accidental damage. Objective responsibility was the criterion for moral realism. Subjects rated how responsible the actor was for the damage and how angry they would be with the actor, and they selected consequences appropriate for the offender. Results indicated that degree of responsibility attributed to the offender, anger experienced by the victims, and expectations of repayment or compensation increased with severity of damage. The view of adult moral judgment as based only on logic is questioned, and the influence of emotion on moral judgment is considered.

Cognitive models of class structure and explanations of social outcomes

AbstractIn this paper we argue that people's explanations of a wide range of social outcomes occur within a framework of expectations derived from beliefs about the pervasive influence of social class on individuals' life‐chances. This claim is tested by examining the effect of varying the social class origins of vignette characters on judgments and explanations concerning their outcomes. Four domains of social activity are examined: occupational attainment, educational achievement, relationship success, and unemployment. In all of these areas, the class background of the characters was found to be associated with different outcome expectations, future expectations, judgments of responsibility and differences in the ways in which outcomes were explained. The results are consistent with the claim that people have cognitive models in which social class background is associated with particular social outcomes across a range of activities, and that these models are reasonably accurate representations of the relationships between social class and life‐chances. This suggests that contrary to theories which have stressed the individualistic nature of belief systems in western societies, social class forms an important part of the popular representation of the influences on occupational, educational and relationship success.

Judgments of Personal Responsibility for HIV Infection: An Attributional Analysis

This article examines the influence that attributions of personal responsibility for infection with the human immunodeficiency virus have on service and policy responses to the epidemic. A model of attributed responsibility is proposed that classifies social judgments of another person's behavior that take into account the extent to which the behavior caused the situation, the person knew or should have known the potential consequences of the behavior, the person intended to engage in the behavior, and factors over which the person had little or no control might have influenced the behavior. Research has shown that attributions of responsibility lead to increased anger, decreased empathy, and a diminished willingness to offer help to others in need. The author concludes that awareness of attributions of responsibility may help reduce their discriminatory effects at all levels of social work practice.

Traditional and Nontraditional Women's Attributions of Responsibility to Physically Resistive and Nonresistive Rape Victims1

This research examined the interactive effect of women observers' sex‐role attitudes and a victim's use of physical resistance on perceptions of victim responsibility for a sexual assault. Women read one of two rape scenarios in which a victim either did or did not physically resist a rapist's attack and made judgments concerning victim responsibility. The observers were categorized as being either traditionally conservative or nontraditionally profeminist in their attitudes toward women and their roles in society. An analysis of responsibility judgments indicated that traditional women perceived a victim who resisted the attack as being more responsible for her own victimization than did nontraditional women, whereas nontraditional women assigned more responsibility to a victim who did not resist than did traditional women. These results are considered from a sex‐role socialization perspective; the implications of these findings for legal and health care professionals are discussed.

Assessing Marriage via Telephone Interviews and Written Questionnaires: A Methodological Note

Telephone interviews are becoming an increasingly popular method of data collection in marital research. The present study examines whether the assessment of marital adjustment and perceived responsibility for marital events yields comparable results across telephone interviews and written questionnaires. Although the rank ordering of scores on both measures was consistent across these two administrative conditions, mean marital adjustment scores obtained on questionnaires were significantly lower than those obtained in the telephone interviews. Mean scores for the responsibility judgments did not differ significantly across response formats. The implications of these findings for different types of studies are discussed.

The Concept of Responsibility and Determinants of Responsibility Judgment in the Japanese Context

As in the case of the English word responsibility, the Japanese equivalent sekinin is an over‐used term with multiple meanings. At least two distinctive usages are noted for the Japanese concept of responsibility: 1) to describe duties or obligations pertaining to a person's role or position; and 2) to assign blame or sanction to someone when an untoward occurrence is observed. By utilizing a number of peculiar incidents that resulted in some harm, the present study has found that subjects' responsibility judgments in terms of the second type of usage were largely determined by the following two factors: 1) the causal relationship of the agent's act to the harm that ensued; and 2) the morality of the act itself without regard to consequences. In the cases where these two aspects contradicted, especially where the blameworthy act was not directly connected to the harm, judgments about the agent's responsibility were found to diverge among subjects. It was also shown that subjects most often referred to these aspects in elucidating the reasons for attributing responsibility to, or negating the responsibility of, the agent.