Mental control and attributions of blame for negligent wrongdoing.

Abstract

Judgments of blame for others are typically sensitive to what an agent knows and desires.However, when people act negligently, they do not know what they are doing and do not desire the outcomes of their negligence. How, then, do people attribute blame for negligent wrongdoing?We propose that people attribute blame for negligent wrongdoing based on perceived mental control, or the degree to which an agent guides their thoughts and attention over time. To acquire information about others' mental control, people self-project their own perceived mental control to anchor third-personal judgments about mental control and concomitant responsibility for negligent wrongdoing. In four experiments (N = 841), we tested whether perceptions of mental control drive third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing. Study 1 showed that the ease with which people can counterfactually imagine an individual being non-negligent mediated the relationship between judgments of control and blame. Studies 2a and 2b indicated that perceived mental control has a strong effect on judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing and that first-personal judgments of mental control are moderately correlated with third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing. Finally, we used an autobiographical memory manipulation in Study 3 to make personal episodes of forgetfulness salient. Participants for whom past personal episodes of forgetfulness were made salient judged negligent wrongdoers less harshly compared to a control group for whom past episodes of negligence were not salient.Collectively, these findings suggest that first-personal judgments of mental control drive thirdpersonal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing and indicate a novel role for counterfactual thinking in the attribution of responsibility.

One thought too few: An adaptive rationale for punishing negligence

“…We know that people are generally not held responsible in situations where they lack full mental competency or control (e.g., due to mental disturbance, usual source of distraction, having been forced to act, etc. ; (Clarke, 2014(Clarke, , 2017Fincham & Jaspars, 1980;Murray et al, 2022). In addition, philosophers have also proposed that there is an important threshold of "reasonableness" (P. Smith, 1990Smith, , 2003, which echoes a common feature of the law (Miller & Perry, 2012).…”

The pervasive impact of ignorance

“…The vignette leaves open whether there was an opportunity for the captain to learn about the secret passengers in the cargo compartment. This has likely led to individual assumptions about the mutability of the agent's ignorance (Kirfel & Lagnado, 2021b), whether the agent could have done something to acquire the relevant knowledge (Kirsh & Maglio, 1994) or whether the agent was in some sense negligent (Murray, Krasich, Irving, Nadelhoffer, & De Brigard, 2022;Murray, Murray, Stewart, Sinnott-Armstrong, & De Brigard, 2019). All these assumptions will have affected how people responded to the counterfactual relevance question about the agent's epistemic state ("... what the agent could have known.…”

Motivated Counterfactual Thinking and Moral Inconsistency: How We Use Our Imaginations to Selectively Condemn and Condone

“…First, they may contrast reality against an upward counterfactual. For example, observers will blame someone more for negligence when they think about how that person could have acted less negligently (Murray et al, 2022). Thus, we sometimes condemn people because we imagine their behavior could have been more virtuous (Gilbert et al, 2015).…”