Triangulating Political Responsibility: The Motivated Formation of Responsibility Judgments

This article analyzes the process through which partisan bias arises during the formation of citizens' judgments of political responsibility. Informed by theories of motivated political reasoning, it argues that exposure to partisan cues motivates partisans to pursue directional goals, goals which bias the cognitive processing of information and, in turn, overall judgments of responsibility. It further argues that the nature of this biased processing will be such that partisans devalue information inconsistent with their partisan affect. Using a pair of experiments, I test these hypotheses by manipulating both objective evidence concerning gubernatorial responsibility for a state's fiscal imbalance and the presence of partisan cues. Findings support both sets of expectations. The results also suggest that the effects of partisan bias are greater in judgments tied to institutional actions than in those tied to institutional roles and expectations.     

A Unified Empirical Account of Responsibility Judgments*

Skeptical worries about moral responsibility seem to be widely appreciated and deeply felt. To address these worries—if nothing else to show that they are mistaken—theories of moral responsibility need to relate to whatever concept of responsibility underlies the worries. Unfortunately, the nature of that concept has proved hard to pin down. Not only do philosophers have conflicting intuitions; numerous recent empirical studies have suggested that both prosaic responsibility judgments and incompatibilist intuitions among the folk are influenced by a number of surprising factors, sometimes prompting apparently contradictory judgments. In this paper, we show how an independently motivated hypothesis about responsibility judgments provides a unified explanation of the more important results from these studies. According to this ‘Explanation Hypothesis’, to take an agent to be morally responsible for an event is to take a relevant motivational structure of the agent to be part of a significant explanation of the event. We argue that because of how explanatory interests and perspectives affect what we take as significant explanations, this analysis accounts for the puzzling variety of empirical results. If this is correct, the Explanation Hypothesis also provides a new way of understanding debates about moral responsibility.     

An Attributional Analysis of Jurors' Judgments in Civil Cases

Abstract

Jurors' assessment of disputants in civil cases can be conceptualized as an attributional task. An experiment was designed to test the hypothesis that jurors, in the process of performing their attributional analyses of disputants, would exhibit judgmental biases that favor the defendant and disfavor the plaintiff. A total of 166 college students witnessed slide-tape presentations of trials for two civil cases. Each trial represented one condition in a 2 × 2 (Roles × Order) factorial design: Jurors (a) either heard Actors X and Y assume the roles of plaintiff and defendant or heard the same actors assume the opposite roles and (b) expressed their verdicts either before or after engaging in an attributional analysis of each litigant's behavior. The results supported the hypothesis. Juror's attributional analyses in both trials reflected a bias against the plaintiff. Each actor's behavior was attributed more often to hostile intentions and negative stereotypes when he assumed the role of plaintiff than when he was the defendant. Juror's verdicts also reflected a bias against the plaintiff, with votes for each actor in both trials decreasing as he shifted from defendant to plaintiff. No significant order effect was detected in either trial.     

The Experience of Agency: Feelings, Judgments, and Responsibility

ABSTRACT— The experience of agency refers to the experience of being in control both of one's own actions and, through them, of events in the external world. Recent experimental studies have investigated how people recognise a particular event as being caused by their own action or by that of another person. These studies suggest that people match sensory inputs to a prediction based on the action they are performing. Other studies have contrasted voluntary actions to physically similar but passive body movements. These studies suggest that voluntary action triggers wide-ranging changes in the spatial and temporal experience not only of one's own body but also of external events. Prediction and monitoring of the consequences of one's own motor commands produces characteristic experiences that form our normal, everyday feeling of being in control of our life. We conclude by discussing the implications of recent psychological work for our notions of responsibility for action.     

Upward versus Downward Anchoring in Frequency Judgments of Social Facts

Frequency estimation of social facts in two methods of judgment elicitation was investigated. In the “narrow-range” condition, subjects answered questions in the format: “Out of 100 incidents, how many belong to category X?” In the “wide-range” condition, the frequency for the same event was assessed with respect to “Out of 10,000”. Judged frequencies in the wide-range condition were divided by 100, and were compared with the corresponding judgments in the narrow-range condition. Such comparisons were made for low-frequency and high-frequency events. Previous research has shown that, for low-frequency events, judged frequencies are proportionally greater in the narrow-range than in the wide-range condition. These results reflect cognitive processes of implicit anchoring, whereby judged frequencies lie close to small numbers within the response ranges provided. I call this process “downward anchoring,” and predicted that this tendency would be replicated in the present study. Moreover, I predicted that assessments about high-frequency events would evoke similar cognitive processes operating in the opposite direction. By such “upward anchoring,” judged frequencies would lie close to relatively larger numbers within the given response ranges. Consequently, I predicted that judged frequencies for high-frequency events would be proportionally greater in the wide-range condition than in the narrow-range condition. These predictions were confirmed.     

Preadolescents' Social Judgments: The Relationship Between Self-Endorsement of Traits and Gender-Related Judgments of Female Peers

The present study investigated therelationship between preadolescents' and earlyadolescents' inferences and judgments of a target girl,their self-endorsement of traditionally feminine andmasculine traits, the gender of the playmates and thegender-typedness of the game. Preadolescents and earlyJewish Israeli adolescents males and females (n = 251)were shown a video film portraying a female targetplaying a feminine, masculine or neutral game witheither boys or girls and then made a variety ofinferences and judgments about the target. The gender ofthe playing partners and the gender-typedness of thegame were found to influence preadolescents'inferences of female targets' traits, roles andoccupations, but not their motivational-emotionaljudgments. Gender differences emerged such that theinferences of boys were more often in accordance withtraditional gender stereotypes. Selfendorsement oftraits did not seem to influence preadolescents'judgments, except in those of the cross-gender children.The results are discussed within the framework of genderschema theories.     

Intention and Responsibility in Double Effect Cases

I argue that the moral distinction in double effect cases rests on a difference not in intention as traditionally stated in the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE), but in desire. The traditional DDE has difficulty ensuring that an agent intends the bad effect just in those cases where what he does is morally objectionable. I show firstly that the mental state of a rational agent who is certain that a side-effect will occur satisfies Bratman's criteria for intending that effect. I then clarify the nature of the moral distinction in double effect cases and how it can be used to evaluate the moral blameworthiness of agents rather than the moral status of acts. The agent's blameworthiness is reduced not by his lack of intention but by his desire not to bring about the side-effect, and the 'counterfactual test' can be used to determine whether he desires the effect in acting. In my version, the DDE has its rationale in virtue ethics; it is not liable to abuse as the traditional version is; and it makes more plausible distinctions when applied to standard examples.     

The Effects of Onset and Offset Responsibility on Affects and Helping Judgments1

Attributional studies of helping have examined perceivers affective responses and helping intentions as a function of responsibility (controllability) for the onset of a problem. This study extended the analysis to a responsibility for the solution (offset) of a problem and examined how the cause of both the onset and the offset of a problem determined perceivers' affective responses and helping intentions. One hundred and eighty subjects participated in the study. The subjects read one of three stories regarding the target person's behavior at the onset of falling behind in school (“sick” vs. “effort” vs. “no effort”) and reported their perceptions of the cause of the problem, affective responses, and helping intentions. Then they read one of three stories regarding the target person's behavior for the offset of the problem (“sick” vs. “effort” vs. “no effort”:' and responded again to the previously administered scales. Results indicated (a) that the final responses were strongly determined by the offset information. and (b) that sickness at the time of the onset led to negative affect and less helping intention when the offset information was “no effort.” The latter effect is discussed within the context of the moral judgment. Furthermore, structural equation analyses for the responses after the offset information revealed (a) that Weiner's “attribution-emotion-helping” model was applicable. and (b) that the effect of the effort perception on the helping intention was mediated by anger and pity.     

Self and Social Judgments of Ability: Beyond Distributional Information

ABSTRACT

In a given domain, low-skill individuals typically evaluate the ability level of other people more favorably than high-skill individuals. The current study tests whether this tendency continues to occur even when people have unambiguous distributional information available through which to judge others. Students received distributional information detailing their percentile rank in a statistics course and the percentile rank of another student in the course. Then, students were asked to evaluate their own and the other students' statistics ability. Students evaluated the other person's ability more favorably when their own rank in the course was low rather than high. Therefore, people may use themselves as a standard of comparison when they judge others even when more diagnostic sources of information are available.     

儒家的义利之辨与企业的社会责任

义利之辨是儒学的重要内容。儒家所谓的"义"指一般的道德准则,所谓的"利"通常情况下指个人私利。在义与利孰先孰后、孰重孰轻的问题上,儒家始终强调义的优先地位,主张义以为上、先利后义、重义轻利,反对重利轻义、见利忘义、唯利是图。但儒家并不排斥利,且认为追求利益是人之本性,甚至认为义能带来利。义有"一人之正义"、"一时之大义"和"古今之通义"之分,当三者发生矛盾时,儒家认为应以"古今之通义"作为价值判断的终极准则。儒家的义利之辨对现代企业管理有着重要的指导意义,有助于企业和企业家树立正确的义利观。     

The Role of Source Confusions in Television's Cultivation of Social Reality Judgments

The chief hypothesis of this study was that errors in memory (specifically source confusions) contribute to the link between television viewing and social reality judgments. Fiction-to-news confusions (fictional programming remembered as news) were hypothesized to positively predict TV-biased judgments of reality. News-to-fiction confusions (news remembered as fiction) were hypothesized to negatively predict such judgments. The results of an experiment in which subjects watched television programming containing both news and fiction indicated that these hypotheses were supported. Levels of confusion interacted with daily television viewing and with the level of certainty attached to the confusions. A manipulation of the visual similarity of the news and fiction content affected subjects'tendency to make source confusions.     

生命科学家的社会伦理责任

生命科学的发展导致了复杂的伦理道德问题,对传统的社会道德观念形成了强烈的冲击.为了最大限度地避免和消除生命科学技术的负面效应,必须制定相应的科技政策和强有力的社会伦理道德规范来约束生命科学家的行为,增强生命科学家的社会责任感,使生命科学更好地为人类造福.     

医患矛盾报道中媒体的社会责任

社会转型期医疗纠纷复杂程度增加,医疗纠纷的特殊性和轰动性使其成为新闻热点而频频出现在各种媒体上.媒体有失公正的报道加深了患者及受众对医方的不信任感,导致了医患矛盾的加剧.媒体客观的报道有利于医患矛盾的调和,从媒体的社会责任入手,探讨媒体理性报道对医患矛盾的调和作用.