John M. Doris’s research while affiliated with Cornell University and other places

In this chapter, I will evaluate the psychology of blame from a feminist perspective. My intention is to bring the literature on feminist moral psychology into conversation with the literature on the psychology of blame. To this end, I will apply some central feminist critiques to four dominant theories of blame: cognitive theory, emotional theory, conative theory, and functional theory. These theories each identify blame with specific psycho- logical contents, except for functional theory, which says that blame (whatever it is) plays a specific functional role in our interpersonal practices. Feminist moral psychology has much to say about the role of cognition, emotions, desires, and beliefs in moral reasoning, so it should have a great deal say about psychological theories of blame. Although feminist moral psychology is a vast and internally diverse field of inquiry, there are a few central debates within this literature— particularly about emotions, the role of distorted states in moral reasoning, and individualism versus collectivism— all of which have implications for theories of blame. With this in mind, I’ll briefly outline the relevant debates in feminist moral psychology in the next section, and then bring them into conversation with debates about the psychology of blame in §35.3.

Numerous commentaries on the Milgram experiments entertain versions of the Incredulity Hypothesis, which maintains that Milgram’s participants did not as a rule believe they were administering actual shocks. If the Incredulity Hypothesis were generally applicable, it would appear that obedient participants typically did not believe they were doing anything wrong, with the implication that MiIgram was not able to demonstrate alarming levels of destructive obedience—as countless commentators have taken him to have done. In this paper, we demonstrate that the Incredulity Hypothesis is not generally applicable: it cannot easily explain participant behavior in the Milgram experiments and their many replications, nor does it comport well with participants’ self-reports of their experience.

In a series of studies in the U.S. (total N participants = 4,828) using both news articles (Studies 1-2) and constructed scenarios (Studies 3-4), we investigated how judgments of responsibility, blame, causal contribution, and punishment for alleged perpetrators and victims of sexual misconduct are influenced by (1) the political orientation of media outlets, (2) participants’ political orientation, and (3) the alleged perpetrators’ political orientation. Results indicated that participants’ political orientation, and the interaction between participants’ and alleged perpetrators’ political orientation, predicted moral judgments. Conservative participants were generally more likely inculpate and punish alleged victims in all four studies. Both conservative and liberal participants judged politically-aligned alleged perpetrators more leniently than politically-opposed alleged perpetrators. This political ingroup effect was ubiquitous across all tests of the dependent measures for conservative participants; whereas it was muted and unreliable for liberal participants. The findings collectively demonstrate that moral judgments about sexual misconduct are politicized at multiple psychological levels, and in ways that asymmetrically affect victims.

Given its centrality in scholarly and popular discourse, morality should be expected to figure prominently in everyday talk. We test this expectation by examining the frequency of moral content in three contexts, using three methods: (a) Participants’ subjective frequency estimates (N = 581); (b) Human content analysis of unobtrusively recorded in-person interactions (N = 542 participants; n = 50,961 observations); and (c) Computational content analysis of Facebook posts (N = 3822 participants; n = 111,886 observations). In their self-reports, participants estimated that 21.5% of their interactions touched on morality (Study 1), but objectively, only 4.7% of recorded conversational samples (Study 2) and 2.2% of Facebook posts (Study 3) contained moral content. Collectively, these findings suggest that morality may be far less prominent in everyday life than scholarly and popular discourse, and laypeople, presume.

Eight preregistered studies (total N = 3,758) investigate the role of values and relational context in attributions for moral violations, focusing on the following questions: (1) Do people's values influence their attributions? (2) Do people's relationships with the violator (self, close other, distant other) influence their attributions? (3) Do the principles intrinsic to the violated values (e.g., loyalty to close others) further influence their attributions? We found that participants were more likely to attribute violations by distant others to the person committing the violation, rather than the situation in which the violation occurred, when participants endorsed the violated values themselves. The tendency to make dispositional attributions did not obtain for violations of participants' less highly endorsed moral values or non-moral values. Relationship with the violator also influenced participants' attributions-participants were more likely to attribute their own and close others' moral violations to situational factors, relative to distant others' violations. This relational pattern was pronounced for violations of "binding" moral values, in which protection of personal relationships and groups is primary. Collectively, these results support a relational-values account of causal attribution for moral violations, whereby attributions systematically vary based on (1) the relevance of the violated values to the attributor's moral values, (2) the attributor's personal relationship to the violator, and (3) an interaction between (1) and (2) such that the principles intrinsic to the violated values influence the effects of one's relationship to the violator.