Attributing responsibility for an accident: A methodological and conceptual critique.

Vidmar, Neil; Crinklaw, Linda D

doi:10.1037/h0081861

Cited by 56 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 24 publications

(51 reference statements)

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“…But responsibility is a complex concept with several, partly overlapping meanings (Fincham & Jaspars, 1980;Gailey & Falk, 2008;Vidmar & Crinklaw, 1974), including a concept of causal responsibility, which concerns the relative contributions of individual actors to the joint result, and moral responsibility, or blameworthiness, which requires that the actor can be credited with some degree of insight, intention, and control (Shaver, 1985;Weiner, 1995). Responsibility as used in the egocentric bias literature is clearly of the causal variety, whereas the diffusion of responsibility hypothesis suggests that people in a group or crowd tend to downplay their moral responsibility.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Responsibility is Divisible by Two, But Not by Three or Four: Judgments of Responsibility in Dyads and Groups

Teigen¹,

Brun²

2011

Social Cognition

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When two individuals are doing a joint task, most people seem to think that the responsibility should be divided proportionally between them in a complementary fashion, so that an increase in one actor's responsibility leads to a corresponding decrease in the responsibility of the second actor. however, with three or four actors, the individual responsibilities of the first two are not reduced. As a consequence, the sum of responsibility assessments exceeds 100%, and a change in one actor's responsibility does not have to affect the perceived responsibility of the others, indicating a singular (case-based), rather than a distributional (class-based) view. The shift from additive to nonadditive responses is demonstrated in four vignette studies, using different response formats, and for actions involving causal as well as moral responsibility. The pattern of results is compatible with the singularity principle in judgment, according to which only one hypothesis, or one comparison, can be considered at a time.1. Cross-country skiing combined with target shooting.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Responsibility is Divisible by Two, But Not by Three or Four: Judgments of Responsibility in Dyads and Groups

Teigen¹,

Brun²

2011

Social Cognition

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“…Responsibility attributions may differ, depending on which of these definitions of responsibility is elicited from the respondent by the stimulus materials and the questions. Fincham and Jaspars (1 980) have suggested that mixed results in the attribution literature may be a result, in part, of the use of the term responsibilify to connote different meanings (e.g., causation, moral blame) in different studies.4 Vidmar and Crinklaw (1974) suggested that responsibility ought to be conceptualized as "a probability statement that a relation exists between a stimulus person and a certain magnitude of responsibility of a certain qualitative type" (p. 126). Thus, they suggested that researchers be deliberate in the selection of dependent variables that allow for the detection of qualitative differences in judgments of responsibility.…”

Section: Wide Range Of Dependent Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Outcome Severity and Judgments of “Responsibility”: A Meta‐Analytic Review¹

Robbennolt

2000

J Applied Social Pyschol

163

120

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Research has provided mixed support for the hypothesis that when an incident results in a more severe outcome, more responsibility will be attributed to a potentially responsible actor. This paper uses the techniques of meta‐analysis to examine this literature. The results support the contention that people attribute greater responsibility for the outcome of a negative incident when that outcome is more severe than when the outcome is minor. The direction of this relationship is consistent across methodologies. However, the strength of the correlation varies depending on which type of judgment participants are asked to make. Because many of these variables are tied to legal concepts, the results are discussed in the context of the expectations of the legal system regarding the impact of outcome severity on each variable.

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“…Supervisors, more than their subordinates, tend to attribute workers' errors (Mitchell & Kalb, 1981;Mitchell & Wood, 1980) and serious accidents (DeJoy, 1985(DeJoy, , 1987 to factors internal to the workers. Reviews by Vidmar and Crinklaw (1974) and by Burger (1981) have supported this stance.…”

Section: The Self-defensive Attribution Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 80%

Causal Attributions of Ghanaian Industrial Workers for Accident Occurrence

Gyekye

Salminen

2004

J Applied Social Pyschol

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This study confirms the self-defensive attribution hypothesis on causal attributions of accidents in Ghana's work environment. In this investigation, Ghanaian industrial workers and their supervisors assigned causality to industrial accidents, and their responses were compared. The results showed that the victims attributed their accidents to external causes to a greater extent than did the supervisors, and to internal causes to a lesser extent than did the supervisors. This finding reflects the tendency toward self-protective bias, whereby people tend to project blame for their failures onto external circumstances.In the execution of job assignments, employees often encounter negative performance outcomes that lead to information search and attribution formulation. These causal explanations help people to find remedies that are used to prevent future accidents from happening. The importance of being able to explain and predict such accidents has led to a number of studies on attribution explorations. However, the research results on causal attributions have often provided evidence of self-serving and ego-protecting biases.These attributional distortions are rather common in novel and ambiguous situations (Wong & Weiner, 1981), where one is faced with multiple causal agents, as in the case of industrial accidents (DeJoy, 1985(DeJoy, , 1990Turner & Pidgeon, 1997). As industrial accidents tend to afford fertile ground for causal and responsibility attributional distortions and biases, the work environment therefore seems to be the appropriate domain to examine evidence of causal attribution biases and distortions. An example of such attributional distortion occurs when people make use of self-protective mechanisms to project blame for their personal failures onto external circumstances. This has been labeled the selfdefensive attribution hypothesis (Shaver, 1970a;Walster, 1966).

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Attributing responsibility for an accident: A methodological and conceptual critique.

Cited by 56 publications

References 24 publications

Responsibility is Divisible by Two, But Not by Three or Four: Judgments of Responsibility in Dyads and Groups

Responsibility is Divisible by Two, But Not by Three or Four: Judgments of Responsibility in Dyads and Groups

Outcome Severity and Judgments of “Responsibility”: A Meta‐Analytic Review¹

Causal Attributions of Ghanaian Industrial Workers for Accident Occurrence

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Attributing responsibility for an accident: A methodological and conceptual critique.

Cited by 56 publications

References 24 publications

Responsibility is Divisible by Two, But Not by Three or Four: Judgments of Responsibility in Dyads and Groups

Responsibility is Divisible by Two, But Not by Three or Four: Judgments of Responsibility in Dyads and Groups

Outcome Severity and Judgments of “Responsibility”: A Meta‐Analytic Review1

Causal Attributions of Ghanaian Industrial Workers for Accident Occurrence

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Outcome Severity and Judgments of “Responsibility”: A Meta‐Analytic Review¹