Moral psychology
Does breaking a rule make you 'the cause' even if the rule is irrelevant?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
People overwhelmingly blamed the person who broke an unrelated rule as the sole cause of an outcome, and when an outcome was bad and unforeseeable they became more likely to say nobody caused it.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — 3 × 3 × 2 between-subjects vignette design: timing of two people's logins (together, Alice first, Zoe first) × outcome (neutral, good, bad) × norm (none, Zoe breaks a company rule); each participant read one of 18 scenarios.
- N
- N=2022 · Online MTurk participants; 1283 answered the forced-choice causation question and 739 rated blame/praise. Individual scenario cells ranged roughly from 40 to about 107 people.
- Population
- Adult native English speakers recruited on Amazon Mechanical Turk
- Outcome
- Forced choice of who caused the outcome (Alice, Zoe, both, neither, not sure); blame/praise ratings from -3 to +3
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Key findings
When both logged in together with a neutral outcome and no rule broken, 81.5% said both caused it; when they logged in one after the other, many people picked the later person instead. Making the outcome bad cut 'both' answers to 48.6% and raised 'neither' answers from 11.1% to 43.2%, even though blame ratings did not change. When Zoe broke a rule that had nothing to do with the outcome, 80.4% named her as the sole cause, and a rule violation even overrode timing: 62.7% still chose Zoe when she logged in first.
Methodology
Online participants read one short story in which two coworkers, Alice and Zoe, log into a computer, and the double login unexpectedly triggers an email being sent, spam being deleted (good) or customer emails being deleted (bad). The researchers varied whether the two logged in together or one after the other, whether the outcome was neutral, good or bad, and whether Zoe broke a company rule about who may log in in the morning. Participants then picked who caused the outcome, or rated how blameworthy each person was.
Limitations
All data come from brief hypothetical vignettes about a single office scenario, answered online, so real-world causal and legal judgments may differ. The design shows that outcome valence matters for causal judgment but cannot tell why; the authors' 'anti-bad luck' explanation was not directly tested because moral responsibility was not measured. The rule-violation effect could reflect norm violation itself, blame, or an inference that rule-breaking is statistically unusual, and the study cannot separate these.
How this study connects
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