I propose a textual analysis-based measure to detect when corporate executives blame bad performance on external factors such as industry or the economy (BLAME measure). Using this methodology to analyze quarterly earnings announcement conference call transcripts, I find that: (1) executives are more likely to blame these external factors when their companies experience bad performance, but are...

Blaming—and avoiding blame—are basic social motivations. These two motivations operate in every area of life: family, friendship, school, work, politics. Experimental analysis of these two classes of motivation offers fruitful opportunities for social attitude theory, developmental psychology, motivation theory, and person science. Opportunities to improve the social-moral level of society have...

BACKGROUND Health promotion is an established part of the general practice consultation. It is widely acknowledged that risk-behaviours are strongly affected by socio-economic status and the structural constraints of the individual, but little is known about the possible negative effects of lifestyle advice. OBJECTIVES To examine the extent to which self-responsibility, blame for ill health a...

Static type systems are usually conservative. Therefore, many interesting programs are rejected by the type system, even though they often execute without errors. Dynamic type systems would allow such ill-typed programs to run. However, the cause of runtime errors is often far removed from the place where the type errors are raised, making the program hard to debug. We present a hybrid typing d...

We consider the problem of merging individual text documents, motivated by the single-file merge algorithms of document-based version control systems. Abstracting away the merging of conflicting edits to an external conflict resolution function (possibly implemented by a human), we consider the efficient identification of conflicting regions. We show how to implement tree-based document represe...

The growth of social networking platforms has drawn a lot of attentions to the need for social computing. Social computing utilises human insights for computational tasks as well as design of systems that support social behaviours and interactions. One of the key aspects of social computing is the ability to attribute responsibility such as blame or praise to social events. This ability helps a...

Blame towards the wrongdoer can be a source of distress for people who are injured in a transport accident. The association between blame and psychological stress is well investigated. In contrast, not much is known about blame and health-care utilization. It is important to investigate whether blame is associated with health-care consumption because it may contribute to our knowledge about wha...

Demand-withdraw communication is a set of conflict-related behaviors in which one partner blames or pressures while the other partner withdraws or avoids. The present study examined age-related changes in these behaviors longitudinally over the course of later life stages. One hundred twenty-seven middle-aged and older long-term married couples were observed at 3 time points across 13 years as ...