What are the factors that influence everyday attributions of cause and blame? The current studies focus on sequences of events that lead to adverse outcomes, and examine people's cause and blame ratings for key events in these sequences. Experiment 1 manipulated the intentional status of candidate causes and their location in a causal chain. Participants rated intentional actions as more causal...

Within contemporary penal philosophy, the view that punishment can only be justified if the offender is a moral agent who is responsible and hence blameworthy for their offence is one of the few areas on which a consensus prevails. In recent literature, this precept is associated with the retributive tradition, in the modern form of 'just deserts'. Turning its back on the rehabilitative ideal, ...

In sub-subunit 1.4.2, it is made clear that for Aristotle a crucial precondition of virtue is that actions must be intentional. For Aristotle, voluntary action—or intention—is required if praise or blame is to be appropriate. Praise and blame are important in that they testify to that which is virtuous in the polis, which substantiates the virtues among the citizenry and subsequent generations ...

This study examined whether participants’ attributions of blame and responsibility toward a victim of domestic violence were influenced by whether or not the victim left her abuser. It also looked at whether or not educational information regarding the difficulties of leaving a violent partner would affect these attributions. Participants, all adults from the United States, either read a vignet...

Blame assignment is a classical problem in learning and adaptation. Given a problem solver that fails to deliver the behaviors desired of it, the blame-assignment task has the goal of identifying the cause(s) of the failure. Broadly categorized, these causes can be knowledge faults (errors in the organization, content, and representation of the problemsolver's domain knowledge) or processing fa...

Moral judgment depends critically on theory of mind (ToM), reasoning about mental states such as beliefs and intentions. People assign blame for failed attempts to harm and offer forgiveness in the case of accidents. Here we use fMRI to investigate the role of ToM in moral judgment of harmful vs. helpful actions. Is ToM deployed differently for judgments of blame vs. praise? Participants evalua...

This is the first systematic review of the evidence on the prevalence of self-blame, guilt, and shame in bereaved parents. A search of PsychINFO, MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL, PubMed, and Science Direct resulted in 18 studies for the period 1975 to 2013 which the authors have appraised. Self-blame, guilt, and shame are common in bereaved parents, albeit to varying degrees, with differential relation...

Static and dynamic type systems have well-known strengths and weaknesses. Gradual typing provides the benefits of both in a single language by giving the programmer control over which portions of the program are statically typed and which portions are dynamically checked based on the presence or absence of type annotations. A compiler for a gradually typed language infers where the dynamic chec...

Two experiments were conducted to examine consumers’ perceptions of blame in the Firestone Tire recall. The extent to which knowledge about Ford or Firestone’s role in the recall was accessible to consumers was manipulated. The results suggest that subtle cues can influence perceptions of blame of a company indirectly involved in a recall but only when consumers have considerable knowledge to d...