Andrew E. Monroe

A Theory of Blame

We introduce a theory of blame in five parts. Part 1 addresses what blame is: a unique moral judgment that is both cognitive and social, regulates social behavior, fundamentally relies on social cognition, and requires warrant. Using these properties, we distinguish blame from such phenomena as anger, event evaluation, and wrongness judgments. Part 2 offers the heart of the theory: the Path Model of Blame, which identifies the conceptual structure in which blame judgments are embedded and the information processing that generates such judgments. After reviewing evidence for the Path Model, we contrast it with alternative models of blame and moral judgment (Part 3) and use it to account for a number of challenging findings in the literature (Part 4). Part 5 moves from blame as a cognitive judgment to blame as a social act. We situate social blame in the larger family of moral criticism, highlight its communicative nature, and discuss the darker sides of moral criticism. Finally, we show how the Path Model of Blame can bring order to numerous tools of blame management, including denial, justification, and excuse.

At the Heart of Morality Lies Folk Psychology

Abstract Moral judgments about an agents behavior are enmeshed with inferences about the agents mind. Folk psychology—the system that enables such inferences—therefore lies at the heart of moral judgment. We examine three related folk-psychological concepts that together shape peoples judgments of blame: intentionality, choice, and free will. We discuss peoples understanding and use of these concepts, address recent findings that challenge the autonomous role of these concepts in moral judgment, and conclude that choice is the fundamental concept of the three, defining the core of folk psychology in moral judgment.

Recent Research on Free Will: Conceptualizations, Beliefs, and Processes

Abstract This chapter summarizes research on free will. Progress has been made by discarding outmoded philosophical notions in favor of exploring how ordinary people understand and use the notion of free will. The concept of responsible autonomy captures many aspects of layperson concepts of free will, including acting on ones own (i.e., not driven by external forces), choosing, using reasons and personal values, conscious reflection, and knowing and accepting consequences and moral implications. Free will can thus be understood as form of volition (action control) that evolved to enable people to live in cultural societies. Much work has shown that belief in free will (as opposed to disbelief) is associated with actions that are conducive to functioning well in culture, including helpfulness, restraint of aggression, learning via counterfactual analysis, thinking for oneself, effective job performance, and appropriate gratitude. Belief in free will increases in response to misdeeds by others, thus emphasizing the link to personal responsibility. Research on volition indicates that self-regulation, intelligent reasoning, decision making, and initiative all deplete a (common) limited energy source, akin to the folk notion of willpower and linked to the bodys glucose supplies. Free will is thus not an absolute or constant property of persons but a variable, fluctuating capability—one that is nonetheless highly adaptive for individuals and society. The notion that people have free will has been invoked in multiple contexts. Legally and morally, it explains why people can be held responsible for their actions. Theologically, it was used to explain why a supposedly kind and omniscient god would send most of the people he created to hell ( Walker, 1964 ). Yet, for such an important concept, there remains wide-ranging disagreement and confusion over its existence and its nature. For example, philosophers still debate whether humans truly have free will and, if so, under what conditions human volition deserves to be considered free ( Kane, 2011 ). In psychology, most theorists believe that humans engage in self-control, rational choice, planning, initiative, and related acts of volition. The debate is not whether these things occur but merely whether these should be called free will. This chapter will provide an overview of recent psychology experiments concerned with free will. There are three main and quite distinct sets of problems, each with associated lines of research. The first is concerned with how people understand the idea of free will. The second concerns the causes and consequences of believing in free will. The third focuses on the actual volitional processes that guide human action.

Morality Goes Beyond Mind Perception

Gray and colleagues make two central claims in their target article. The first is that people fundamentally understand morality in terms of a moral dyad consisting of an intentionally harming agent and a suffering patient; the second is that morality necessarily involves the process of perceiving minds. Both claims underlie the broader thesis that mind perception is the essence of morality, but the claims are largely orthogonal, so we discuss them separately. Before we proceed, we must clarify what morality means. The authors subsume multiple distinct phenomena under this term, including moral judgments, moral norms, moral domains, and moral actions. They propose that each of these phenomena must be understood in terms of mind perception and dyadic representation. To defend each of these claims would require separate arguments and separate evidence, which the authors don’t provide. Some of the claims are also unlikely to be true; for example, many moral norms refer neither to mind perception nor to the suffering of others (e.g., not to destroy the environment). Our commentary therefore focuses on the claim that appears to have the best prospect of being true and for which the authors mount the most arguments and evidence: that dyadic representation and mind perception fundamentally characterize moral judgments.

Two paths to blame: Intentionality directs moral information processing along two distinct tracks.

There is broad consensus that features such as causality, mental states, and preventability are key inputs to moral judgments of blame. What is not clear is exactly how people process these inputs to arrive at such judgments. Three studies provide evidence that early judgments of whether or not a norm violation is intentional direct information processing along 1 of 2 tracks: if the violation is deemed intentional, blame processing relies on information about the agent’s reasons for committing the violation; if the violation is deemed unintentional, blame processing relies on information about how preventable the violation was. Owing to these processing commitments, when new information requires perceivers to switch tracks, they must reconfigure their judgments, which results in measurable processing costs indicated by reaction time (RT) delays. These findings offer support for a new theory of moral judgment (the Path Model of Blame) and advance the study of moral cognition as hierarchical information processing.

Paths to Blame and Paths to Convergence

The past 10 years have seen an unprecedented rise in research on moral psychology. The thoughtful and creative comments on our target article illustrate the vibrancy of the field and the many open questions that are ripe for investigation. Reading these commentaries, we are heartened by the balanced engagement with both theory and evidence and the convergence of perspectives. In discussing some of the major themes in the commentaries we first return to the question of what blame really is and how we can most fruitfully carve out the boundaries between blame and related phenomena. Then we take up the phenomena of victim blame and self-blame as important applications of our model and highlight the important explanatory work that the notion of presets plays. Next, we examine the early and highly consequential process of event detection. Finally we address the greatest challenge to our model: the role of motivational biases in the emergence of blame and how the model accounts for such biases. Throughout, we promote methodological standards we believe must be heeded for significant progress in understanding the psychology of moral judgment.

People systematically update moral judgments of blame.

Six experiments examine people’s updating of blame judgments and test predictions developed from a socially regulated blame perspective. According to this perspective, blame emerged in human history as a socially costly tool for regulating other’s behavior. Because it is costly for both blamers and violators, blame is typically constrained by requirements for “warrant”—evidence that one’s moral judgment is justified. This requirement motivates people to systematically process available causal and mental information surrounding a violation. That is, people are relatively calibrated and evenhanded in utilizing evidence that either amplifies or mitigates blame. Such systematic processing should be particularly visible when people update their moral judgments. Using a novel experimental paradigm, we test 2 sets of predictions derived from the socially regulated blame perspective and compare them with predictions from a motivated-blame perspective. Studies 1–4 demonstrate (across student, Internet, and community samples) that moral perceivers systematically grade updated blame judgments in response to the strength of new causal and mental information, without anchoring on initial evaluations. Further, these studies reveal that perceivers update blame judgments symmetrically in response to exacerbating and mitigating information, inconsistent with motivated-blame predictions. Study 5 shows that graded and symmetric blame updating is robust under cognitive load. Lastly, Study 6 demonstrates that biases can emerge once the social requirement for warrant is relaxed—as in the case of judging outgroup members. We conclude that social constraints on blame judgments render the normal process of blame well calibrated to causal and mental information, and biases may appear when such constraints are absent.