The Effect of Roles and Deeds on Responsibility Judgments: The Normative Structure of Wrongdoing

Human judgment of wrongdoing is a potential meeting groundfor sociological models of norms and psychological models of cognition. The present paper discusses the approach to human responsibility judgments that has dominated psychology since Jean Piaget and expands on that theory from a sociological perspective, arguing that judgments of responsibility are functions of both the deeds an actor performs and the social expectations of others for the actor. Socially differentiated expectations-social roles-should therefore play a crucial part in the judgment of wrongdoing, serving as normative contexts that determine how other information is weighed and used. We identify two dimensions of roles that may be determinants of responsibility judgments: the hierarchy and the solidarity of the actor-victim relationship. We report results from a survey in which experimentally varied vignettes included consideration of role relationships as well as traditional psychological factors (such as the actor's mental state). Results show that roles alter the interpretation and judgment of wrongdoing, including the use of information about mental state. In particular, the normative modelfor judgment of persons in authority over victims differs substantially from the model for judgment of persons who are equals with their victims. It appears that, as predicted, no model of how humans judge responsibility is complete without consideration of social roles and their normative demands.