Culpable control and counterfactual reasoning in the psychology of blame

Many counterfactual reasoning studies assess how people ascribe blame for harmful actions. By itself, the knowledge that a harmful outcome could easily have been avoided does not predict blame. In three studies, the authors showed that an outcome's mutability influences blame and related judgments when it is coupled with a basis for negative evaluations. Study 1 showed that mutability influenced blame and compensation judgments when a physician was negligent but not when the physician took reasonable precautions to prevent harm. Study 2 showed that this finding was attenuated when the victim contributed to his own demise. In Study 3, whether an actor just missed arriving on time to see his dying mother or had no chance to see her influenced his blameworthiness when his reason for being late provided a basis for negative evaluations but made no difference when there was a positive reason for the delay. These findings clarify the conditions under which an outcome's mutability is likely to influence blame and related attributions.     

Culpable Control and Causal Deviance

Actions that are intended to produce harmful consequences can fail to achieve their desired effects in numerous ways. We refer to action sequences in which harmful intentions are thwarted as deviant causal chains. The culpable control model of blame (CCM) is a useful tool for predicting and explaining the attributions that observers make of the actors whose harmful intentions go awry. In this paper, we describe six types of deviant causal chains; those in which: an actor’s attempt is obviated by the intervention of another person or the environment; the intended effects could not have been produced regardless of the actor’s behavior; other causes diminish the actor’s causal role; the actor brings about foreseen but undesired consequences as a result of pursuing his or her focal goal; the focal action produces a chain of increasingly remote causal events; and the actor derives unforeseen benefits from his or her nefarious actions. A basic assumption of the CCM in these cases is that attributions for the participants’ actions will depend on positive and negative evaluations of their intentions and behaviors. We describe empirical findings that are consistent with this assumption, and predict other findings for causal deviance phenomena that have not yet been investigated empirically.     

Punishment and Blame for Culpable Indifference

Abstract

In criminal law, the mental state of the defendant is a crucial determinant of the grade of crime that the defendant has committed and of whether the conduct is criminal at all. Under the widely accepted modern hierarchy of mental states, an actor is most culpable for causing harm purposely and progressively less culpable for doing so knowingly, recklessly, or negligently. Notably, this hierarchy emphasizes cognitive rather than conative mental states. But this emphasis, I argue, is often unjustified. When we punish and blame for wrongful acts, we should look beyond the cognitive dimensions of the actor’s culpability and should consider affective and volitional dimensions as well, including the actor’s intentions, motives, and attitudes. One promising alternative mental state is the attitude of culpable indifference. However, we must proceed carefully when permitting criminal liability to turn on culpable indifference and similar attitudes, lest we punish vicious or unvirtuous feelings that are not sufficiently connected to wrongful acts, and lest we punish disproportionately for attitudes that reflect only a very modest degree of culpability.     

A Capacitarian Account of Culpable Ignorance

Ignorance usually excuses from responsibility, unless the person is culpable for the ignorance itself. Since a lot of wrongdoing occurs in ignorance, the question of what makes ignorance culpable is central for a theory of moral responsibility. In this article I examine a prominent answer, which I call the ‘volitionalist tracing account,’ and criticize it on the grounds that it relies on an overly restrictive conception of responsibility‐relevant control. I then propose an alternative, which I call the ‘capacitarian conception of control,’ and on the basis of it I advance an account of culpable ignorance that avoids the skeptical upshots of the volitionalist proposal. If correct, my account establishes three important truths: agents can be directly in control of their ignorance, they can be directly responsible for more than actions and omissions, and their moral obligations extend beyond the performance of intentional actions and omissions.     

Quality control and the practice of clinical psychology

Because of current health care reforms, quality control, accountability, and cost-effectiveness have become important issues in the practice of clinical psychology. It is imperative that practicing clinicians begin to evaluate their services to assess whether they demonstrate high quality and cost-effectiveness, as well as a continued commitment to qualify improvement. Deming's (1986) approach to quality control is discussed as a useful strategy for improving effectiveness in the practice of clinical psychology. This approach emphasizes the process of identification of the client population, improvements through incremental processes, and evaluation of outcomes. Organizational Behavior Management (OBM) techniques are also reviewed as useful ways in which to supplement and improve on Deming's approach to quality control. Science and quality control are discussed as being inherently coherent. The scientist—practitioner model dictates that services provided to clients should be rigorously evaluated. Various procedures for evaluating the quality of services provided in clinical practice are discussed.     

Esteem and control bases of blame: "Adaptive" strategies for victims versus observers

An experiment was conducted to determine the esteem and control correlates of behavioral and characterological blame for victims and observers. On the basis of a proposed motivation to minimize perceptions of vulnerability, it was predicted that behavioral self-blame would be “adaptive” for victims, whereas both behavioral and characterological blame of the victim would be “adaptive” for observers. As hypothesized, behavioral self-blame by victims was associated with high self-esteem and perceptions of future avoid ability of the victimization, whereas both behavioral and characterological blame by observers were associated with high self-esteem. Behavioral blame was more likely to be engaged in by victims than by observers, and characterological blame was more likely to be engaged in by low esteem victims and high esteem observers. The study employed a role-playing/observer methodology. The adequacy of this methodology and the generalizability of results to actual victim/observer populations are discussed.     

Institutional Evils,Culpable Complicity,and Duties to Engage in Moral Repair

Apology is arguably the central act of the reparative work required after wrongdoing. The analysis by Claudia Card (1940–2015) of complicity in collectively perpetrated evils moves one to ask whether apology ought to be requested of persons culpably complicit in institutional evils. To better appreciate the benefits of and barriers to apologies offered by culpably complicit wrongdoers, this article examines doctors’ complicity in a practice that meets Card's definition of an evil, namely, the non‐medically necessary, nonconsensual “normalizing” interventions performed on babies born with intersex anatomies. It argues that in this instance the complicity of doctors is culpable on Card's terms, and that their culpable complicity grounds rightful demands for them to apologize.     

A high-level language for control of psychology experiments

A language for controlling learning, memory, and perception experiments is described. The language features the capability of manipulating large amounts of alphanumeric information with ease. A small, but powerful, command set uses the psychologists’, rather than the programmers’, logic and jargon.     

Intergroup helping during the coronavirus crisis: Effects of group identification,ingroup blame and third party outgroup blame

Two studies tested predictors of helping across national boundaries. British participants reported blame attributions for the coronavirus crisis, either to the British government (ingroup blame), or to the Chinese government (third party outgroup blame), and it was tested whether this was associated with intentions to donate money to help outgroup members suffering from effects of the coronavirus crisis in the world's poorer countries. It was hypothesized that strength of identification with the national ingroup would be negatively associated with blame attributions to the ingroup, and that it would be positively associated with blame attributions to a third party outgroup. Blame attributions were predicted in turn to be related to outgroup helping, with ingroup blame being positively associated with helping intentions, and third party outgroup blame being negatively associated with helping intentions. Support for these predictions were found in one exploratory (N = 100) and one confirmatory (N = 250) study.     

A dual-motive model of scapegoating: displacing blame to reduce guilt or increase control

The authors present a model that specifies 2 psychological motives underlying scapegoating, defined as attributing inordinate blame for a negative outcome to a target individual or group, (a) maintaining perceived personal moral value by minimizing feelings of guilt over one's responsibility for a negative outcome and (b) maintaining perceived personal control by obtaining a clear explanation for a negative outcome that otherwise seems inexplicable. Three studies supported hypotheses derived from this dual-motive model. Framing a negative outcome (environmental destruction or climate change) as caused by one's own harmful actions (value threat) or unknown sources (control threat) both increased scapegoating, and these effects occurred indirectly through feelings of guilt and perceived personal control, respectively (Study 1), and were differentially moderated by affirmations of moral value and personal control (Study 2). Also, scapegoating in response to value threat versus control threat produced divergent, theoretically specified effects on self-perceptions and behavioral intentions (Study 3).     

Association between shame aversion and ruminative retribution: Evidence for moderation by externalization of blame and control

Motivation and Emotion - Shame aversion has been theorized to motivate aggression against the self or others as means of down-regulating shame. Additionally, the direction of aggression may depend...     

Luck,blame, and desert

T.M. Scanlon has recently proposed what I term a ‘double attitude’ account of blame, wherein blame is the revision of one’s attitudes in light of another person’s conduct, conduct that we believe reveals that the individual lacks the normative attitudes we judge essential to our relationship with her. Scanlon proposes that this account justifies differences in blame that in turn reflect differences in outcome luck. Here I argue that although the double attitude account can justify blame’s being sensitive to outcome luck, it cannot justify allocating blame differently when agents with the same attitudes differ only with respect to the luck-based outcomes of their actions. However, Scanlon’s own contractualist theory of morality can be invoked to show that the double attitude account is compatible with blame-based sanctions (e.g., compensation mandated when negligence or reckless result in harm) being sensitive to outcome luck. The resultant view of blame and luck remains desert-based while making sense of the common intuition that differences in outcome luck can matter to how lucky and unlucky individuals are justifiably treated.     

The self-effacing functionality of blame

Philosophical Studies - This paper puts forward an account of blame combining two ideas that are usually set up against each other: that blame performs an important function, and that blame is...     

The blame of dying young

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

The emotion account of blame

For a long time the dominant view on the nature of blame was that to blame someone is to have an emotion toward her, such as anger, resentment or indignation in the case of blaming someone else and guilt in the case of self-blame. Even though this view is still widely held, it has recently come under heavy attack. The aim of this paper is to elaborate the idea that to blame is to have an emotion and to defend the resulting emotion account of blame.