Blaming as a Social Process: The Influence of Character and Moral Emotion on Blame

I INTRODUCTION When we assign blame for something bad that happened, we are doing something social--we are identifying another human being who caused harm, without justification or excuse. A window broken by a hurricane elicits a story about cause, but not a story about blame; a window broken by a person elicits blame attribution. Once a human agent is identified, we naturally turn our attention to blame severity, a complex judgment shaped by several different concerns. A window broken by a child's stray baseball is assessed differently from a window broken by a vandal, or by a burglar, or by a white supremacist. Assessing blame involves not only determining the badness of the harm (for example, property damage versus injured person), but also the badness of the actor's mental state (for example, accident versus intentional), and perhaps even the badness of the actor's motive (for example, general destructiveness versus racial hatred). When viewed this way, we see that blame--as a psychological matter--involves attributions about other people and the extent to which they intend to harm us or otherwise pose a threat to the social order. In this sense, blaming is social because it is about attributions of other people and their intentions. The law takes account of each of the blame dimensions just mentioned. The criminal law reserves more severe offense categories for more severe harm. It imposes more serious liability when mens rea is more culpable, all else being equal. And sometimes, as is the case with hate crimes, it explicitly takes into account the actor's motive for causing harm. But there is another possible influence on blame not yet mentioned--an influence which the law has sought to minimize. The moral character of the actor, apart from that actor's motive or reasons for acting, might play an important role--as a descriptive matter--in the psychological process of blame. Yet, for the most part, the law eschews the role of moral character in legal blame. (1) In a previous article, my colleague and I explored empirically the question of motive for acting, and how it produces inferences about moral character that influence blame judgments. (2) By contrast, the first overarching goal of the current article is to provide experimental evidence supporting the hypothesis that psychological blame is influenced by perceptions of the actor's overall virtue or lack thereof, even apart from the actor's reason for acting in the specific instance. This article marshals experimental evidence to support the idea that a person with a flawed moral character is blamed more for causing harm than a person who is otherwise virtuous. Thus, we are likely to blame more severely a drug-addicted high school dropout who knocks down ten rural mailboxes with a baseball bat than an A-student who is on the chess team who engages in the same action. Similarly, we are likely to blame more severely an abusive parent who drives recklessly and unintentionally hits a pedestrian than a model parent who performs the same act with the same mens rea. The experiment reported here implements a rigorous test of this hypothesis and shows that even mildly unpleasant character traits, such as unreliability, can lead observers to blame more harshly, and to bolster these harsh blame judgments with increased perceptions of the actor's causal role and his intent to cause harm. The findings reported here echo research examining criminal cases suggesting that the defendant's prior criminal record can influence jury verdicts. For example, in cases where evidence is weak, there is a positive correlation between the jury learning that the defendant had committed prior crimes and the likelihood of conviction. (3) This suggests that in the absence of compelling evidence tending to prove guilt, juries sometimes use the fact that defendants had committed prior crimes as a reason to think they might be guilty of the crimes in question. …