Text

theses

Recent years have witnessed renewed, multidisciplinary interest in the study of moral judgments and processes through which people determine responsibility for actions. Nevertheless, the psychological determinants and underpinnings of moral responsibility attribution remain largely unclear. The present study aimed to replicate and extend research on the role of “identification” (Woolfolk, Doris, & Darley, 2006), the degree to which an actor embraces and desires to perform an action, by examining responsibility attributions for morally positive (prosocial) behavior. The actor’s level of identification was systematically varied along with situational constraint (the degree to which the action was coerced and compelled by external circumstances) in scenarios presented to participants (n = 204), which described a father’s donating a kidney to his daughter. Identification had a sizable impact on attributions of responsibility and credit and moderated the effects of constraint. When the actor was identified with the action, the level of responsibility and credit ascribed to him for the good deed was consistently high and unaffected by increases in constraint, even when external forces impelling the action were so powerful that he had no other choice but to engage in the action. When the actor was not identified, he received much credit when he performed the act under minimal levels of external pressure, but was judged to be progressively less responsible for the good deed as the constraints impelling him to act increased. Similar effects but in the opposite direction emerged for credit ascribed to an external agent who coerced the actor to perform the act. Results suggest that perceptions regarding an actor’s desires and intentions play a central role in responsibility ascription for morally positive as well as negative acts, even acts that are caused by circumstances outside of the actor’s control, and can moderate or eclipse the attributional effects of an actor’s control over events. Results also add to the small body of research suggesting distinctions in judgments of prosocial versus antisocial behaviors. Results are interpreted in light of psychological theories of responsibility attribution and moral cognition and implications for philosophical debates about the compatibility of responsibility and determinism are considered.

ETD_5812

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Daniel Chazin

doi:10.7282/T3XD104S

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.