Explaining Away Responsibility:Effects of Scientific Explanation

on Perceived Culpability

John MonterossoDepartment of XXXXXXX

University of California, Los Angeles

Edward B. RoyzmanDepartment of XXXXXXXUniversity of Pennsylvania

Barry SchwartzDepartment of XXXXXXX

Swarthmore College

College students and suburban residents completed questionnaires designed to ex-amine the tendency of scientific explanations of undesirable behaviors to mitigateperceived culpability. In vignettes relating behaviors to an explanatory antecedent,we manipulated the uniformity of the behavior given the antecedent, the responsive-ness of the behavior to deterrence, and the explanatory antecedent-type offeredphysiological (e.g., a chemical imbalance) or experiential (e.g., abusive parents).Physiological explanations had a greater tendency to exonerate actors than did expe-riential explanations. The effects of uniformity and deterrence were smaller, and thelatter had a significant effect on judgment only when physiological rather than expe-riential antecedents were specified. Physiologically explained behavior was morelikely to be characterized as automatic, and willpower and character were lesslikely to be cited as relevant to the behavior. Physiological explanations of undesir-able behavior may mitigate blame by inviting nonteleological causal attributions.

Keywords: person perception, volition, moral attribution, responsibility

ETHICS & BEHAVIOR, 15(2), 139158Copyright 2005, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Correspondence should be addressed to John Monterosso, University of California at Los Angeles,760 Westwood Plaza, Rm C8532, Los Angeles, CA 90024. E-mail: jmont@ucla.edu

When we have absolutely no understanding of the causes of an actionwhether vi-cious or virtuous or simply non-moralwe ascribe a greater element of freewill to it.In the case of a crime, we are more urgent in demanding punishment for the act. Inthe cases of no moral bearing, we recognize more individuality, originality, and inde-pendence in it. But if only one of the innumerable causes of the act is known to us, werecognize a certain amount of necessity, and are less ready to exact punishment forthe crime.

Tolstoy, War and Peace

In the musical West Side Story, the character Action pleads Dear kindly Ser-geant Krupke, you gotta understand, its just our bringin up-ke, that gets us out ofhand. Our mothers all are junkies. Our fathers all are drunks. Golly Moses,natcherly were punks. Such an explanation of behavior (in this case particularlysuspect in its offering by the actor) may be differentiated from the greater part ofordinary attributions in that its references are causal antecedents to the actors own(delinquent) disposition. Heider (1958) characterized such attributions as thestage at which [the individuals] own motives are not entirely ascribed to him butare seen as having their source in the environment (p. 132). We refer to such ex-planations as predispositional attributions, because these attributions refer toevents (bad parenting in the previous example) that are causally antecedent to adisposition responsible for the culpable act. Making such an attribution may in partget the actor off the hook by convincing the observer that the actor was somehowless an originator of the behavior than previously supposed. In the studies reportedhere, we assess some aspects of this tendency. We are not currently concerned withthe question of when, if ever, it is appropriate for predispositional attributions toexonerate actors for undesirable behaviors. Our goal is instead to characterize thistendency in ordinary person perception.

Of course, the potential sources of predispositional attributions are boundless.Our focus in this study is on predispositional attributions based within the behav-ioral sciences. As the various behavioral sciences progress, they offer more (andmore precise) predispositional attributions for behavior, including for otherwiseblameworthy behavior. For example, through various scientific frameworks, vio-lent behavior has been linked to hypoactivity in the prefrontal cortex (Raine,1994), male infidelity linked to evolutionary history (Buss & Schmitt, 1993), andcountless undesirable traits linked at least inferentially to genetic variation(Bouchard, 1990). To the extent that such science leads behavior to be judged in-voluntary, important social consequences would be expected. Generally, behaviorsthat are judged involuntary are exempt from moral judgment (see Sabini & Silver,1988, for review). The punishment administered and even the anger experienced inresponse to a transgression are greatly reduced when the transgression is judged tobe involuntary (Monahan & Hood, 1976; Schultz, Schleifer, & Altman, 1981).

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Presumably not all predispositional explanations from the behavioral sciencesare equally effective at exonerating individuals for undesirable behavior. In thisanalysis we consider three factors that might affect the impact of predispositionalattributions: (a) the uniformity of the behavior given the predispositional attribu-tion, (b) the responsiveness of the behavior to deterrence, and (c) whether the ante-cedent cited is experiential or physiological.

UNIFORMITY

One view of the effect of predispositional attributions is that they demonstrate aprior state of the world from which the behavior uniformly follows. For exam-ple, a genetic condition connected to violence may excuse an afflicted offenderby providing evidence that the behavior followed with some degree of necessityfrom the physiological condition, and that less room, or perhaps no room, wasavailable to adopt an alternative course. Typically in the behavioral sciences, ex-planations identify causal antecedents that are less than certain in their connec-tion to the explained behavior. Each explanation makes a probabilistic causalclaim, but the strength of the probabilistic connection can vary from one causalaccount to another. Thus, one factor we consider is the effect of the uniformityof behavior given the predispositional attribution. We refer to this as the evi-dence of uniformity factor.

DETERRENCE

The second factor we consider is the responsiveness of the behavior (given thepredispositional antecedent) to deterrence. We ordinarily expect behavior to be in-fluenced by expected consequences. For consequentialist moral theories, this ex-pectation provides the central justification for punishment. The tendency forpredispositional attributions to exonerate actors may then be mediated by the con-ception that the normal influence of expected consequences is no longer at work.Consider a violent act that is explained by the existence of a neurophysiologicalabnormality. If individuals with the abnormality go into violent rampages regard-less of expected consequences, isolating them from the general population issurely a good idea, but punishment beyond that would, we suspect, be viewed bymany as gratuitous. If, on the other hand, such individuals behaved violently onlywhen they thought they could get away with it, then motivation to see justiceserved (i.e., punish harshly) may remain high. The tendency for predispositionalattributions to exonerate actors may then be related to the conceived effect of re-sponsiveness to expected consequences on the predispositional antecedent. We re-fer to this as the deterrence factor.

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EXPLANATORY FRAMEWORK

The third factor we consider is the explanatory framework (explanation type) in-voked by the predispositional attribution. To be specific, we hypothesize thatwithin the behavioral sciences, physiological predispositional attributions have agreater tendency to exonerate actors than do predispositional attributions related toexperience, even when controlling for the two factors previously discussed. Thisconjecture is consistent with a pattern of data reported by Weiner, Perry, andMagnussen (1988, Experiment 2). The researchers manipulated information aboutthe extent to which actors exercised control over the onset of three socially stigma-tized behaviors/conditions: child abuse, drug addiction, and obesity. In the case ofdrug addiction and obesity, onset uncontrollability (the equivalent of predis-positional antecedent) was manipulated by providing participants with informa-tion that hinted at physiological origins (glandular dysfunction and chemical treat-ment) whereas in the case of child abuse, the information hinted at was adverseexperiential conditionsthe actors own experience as a victim of childhoodabuse (which led him to experience severe stress and near a nervous breakdown).Although the two physiological onset-uncontrollable manipulations moderatedperceptions of causal responsibility and negative affect, the experiential onset-un-controllable manipulation did not. We refer to this third factor as the explanatoryframework and throughout consider the distinction within the behavioral sciencesbetween antecedents that are experiential versus those that are physiological.

In this study, we examine the effects and interactions of these three fac-torsuniformity, responsiveness to deterrence, and explanation typeon the ex-tent to which predispositional attributions exonerated actors for personally or so-cially undesirable behaviors.

STUDY 1A

In Study 1A, participants were presented with vignettes depicting personally or so-cially undesirable behavior, with predispositional attributions that varied in termsof uniformity rate given the explanation (20%, 55%, 90%), responsiveness to de-terrence given the explanation (deterrence rarely, sometimes, or usually effective),and explanation type (physiological vs. experiential).

MethodParticipants. One hundred and ninety six participants took part in Study 1A.

Ninety-six were undergraduates from a highly competitive university in the north-eastern United States, and 100 were residents of a primarily White middle-incomesuburb. We drew participants from these two pools because they were conveniently

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available to us, and the inclusion of both allowed some (albeit limited) investiga-tion of the generality of observed effects across demographically different popula-tions. The undergraduate sample was 60.2% female, and the suburban sample was65.9% female. The mean age in the undergraduate sample was 19.48 2.53, and inthe suburban sample was 41.02 6.7. Undergraduates were compensated withcourse extra credit. Suburban resident participants were obtained through a maildrop-off of 400 questionnaires. Those who returned the survey were included in alottery for $100.

Design. The questionnaire (see Appendix) contained four vignettes, each de-pictingan individualwhobehavedeither ina sociallyundesirableway(setting fire toa building, killing a store clerk over a disagreement) or a personally undesirable way(overeating, consistent failure to follow through on plans). At the end of each vi-gnette, an explanation was provided, We varied explanation type (physiological orexperiential), uniformity of the behavior given all individuals for whom the explana-toryantecedentwas true (20%,55%,90%),andresponsiveness todeterrence (rarely,sometimes, or usually). A specific physiological and experiential explanation wascreated for each scenario and stated in terms of scientific research. For example, inthecaseofamanwhokilledastoreclerk inanargument, theexplanationcitedwasei-theranexceptionallyhighquantityofaparticularneurotransmitterorahistoryofbe-ing severely abused as a child (see Appendix for questionnaire details).

The three independent variables were orthogonally manipulated, creating a to-tal of 18 versions of each vignette. To minimize possible confounding effects re-lated to particular combinations of presentation, each of the 18 versions of each vi-gnette appeared in four different questionnaire combinations. Thus 64 differentversions of the questionnaire were distributed. Each participant received a singleversion of each of the four vignettes. Participants were instructed to do their best totreat the particular information as true when making their responses.

After each vignette, participants rated the degree to which the behavior was vol-untary, the degree of sympathy they felt for the individual depicted, the blame miti-gation appropriate given the explanation, how the individual should be treated (thespecifics of this varied across vignettes), and how likely it was that the participantwould have behaved similarly to the individual depicted, given the explanation. Ineach case, responses were made on a 5-point scale. For each vignette, participantswho reported some degree of blame mitigation were also asked to indicate whetherthat mitigation was because the explanation made the behavior highly motivatedand hard to resist doing, made the behavior automatic and uncontrollable, orneither of the above.

Each vignette appeared on a separate page. As a manipulation check, after thelast vignette, participants reached a page that asked them, without turning back toprevious pages, to try to remember facts about the vignettes they had read. For eachvignette, they were given one multiple choice item asking them whether the behav-

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ior was described as rarely, sometimes, or usually deterred, and one item askingthem to indicate what percentage of individuals (for whom the predispositional at-tribution was true) behaved similarly to the individual depicted.

Statistical analysis. We analyzed each vignette separately. As such, inde-pendent variables were fully between-subjects factors. Effects that were present inonly one of the four analyses were ignored to avoid the otherwise inflated risk ofType 1 error. To further limit the risk of Type 1 error, factor analysis was used tocreate a single composite dependent variable for use in the primary analyses ofvariance (ANOVA). Primary analyses for each vignette used ANOVA to model thederived composite score as a function of the three independent variables (explana-tion type, uniformity, and responsiveness to deterrence) and their interaction.These analyses were repeated two ways: (a) including main effect and interactionterms for demographic variables and (b) including only responses from vignettesin which participants correctly recalled the specified uniformity of the behavior(within 10%) and the specified responsiveness to deterrence.

For the multiple choice question asking why the predispositional attributionwas mitigating, we used logistic regression (censoring out neither of the aboveresponses) to model responses with the three independent variables. In this an-alysis we included the composite score from the Likert-type scale items as acovariate. Thus we tried to address the question of whether the independent vari-ables affected choices on this question, controlling for their overall effect onculpability.

Results

Manipulation check. Across vignettes, participants who had just completedthe questionnaire recalled the specified uniformity of the behavior (20%, 55%, or90%) within 10% of the actual value on 70.79% of responses. On the multiplechoice item probing recall of specified response to deterrence (rarely, sometimes,or usually), participants were accurate on 62.5% of responses. The student sample,on average, was more accurate on uniformity recall items than the suburban popu-lation (students 75.8% accurate; suburbanites 65.3% accurate), F(1, 188) = 6.98, p< .01, 2 = .04), although the groups did not differ significantly in accuracy on theidentification of specified deterrence information (students 65.3% accurate; subur-banites 59.4% accurate), F(1, 188) = 2.32, p = .13, 2 = .01). Overall, responses toboth items were correct in 42.4% of vignettes.

Primary analyses. The five Likert-type scale dependent variables (judg-ments of volition, blame mitigation, sympathy, treatment, and likelihood partici-pant would behave similarly) were moderately to highly correlated, ranging fromr(193) = .42 to r(194) = 63. For each vignette, a factor analysis was performed

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based on participants responses to the five scales. We used a principal componentsanalysis without rotation, and an Eigenvalue greater than 1.0 as a cutoff for factorinclusion. For all four vignettes, a single-factor solution was reached that ac-counted for between 55.5% (overeater vignette) and 64.0% (murderer vignette) ofthe variance. The regression single factor score for each set of judgments was com-puted and used as a summary variable. As previously described, to reduce the riskof Type 1 error due to multiple comparisons, analyses were performed only on thissummary variable. Based on the component matrices of the factor analyses, weadopted the label Culpability Composite for this score. Higher scores on the Cul-pability Composite indicate greater perceived voluntary control, less blame miti-gation, less sympathy, less favorable treatment, and lower likelihood that partici-pants believe they would behave similarly. Although the variables used in derivingthe Culpability Composite are not individually analyzed, they are presented insummary form in Table 1.

For each of the four vignettes, an ANOVA was performed predicting the Culpa-bility Composite score from the three manipulated independent variables, alongwith their derivable interactions. As shown in Figure 1, explanation type was ahighly significant predictor of the Culpability Composite for all four vignettes:Overeater, F(1, 175) = 23.8, p < .001, 2 = .12; Fire starter, F(1, 175) = 32.9, p