Attribution of Responsibility for Accidents: A Negligence Law Analogy

Four experiments were conducted to test the usefulness of principles drawn from negligence law for predicting ordinary people's attributions of responsibility for accidental harms. Two principles were suggested. First, when judging responsibility within the legal system, the task of the observer is to determine what risks were foreseeable to the actor prior to the actual accident occurring. Second, judgments of responsibility should increase as the likelihood and severity of the potential harms risked by an act increase, and decrease in proportion to the degree of care taken to prevent the potential harms. A total of 236 undergraduates were presented with story vignettes involving a character who took various levels of care in preventing potential harms that varied in severity. Results supported the predictions. Ratings of responsibility (construed as “negligence” for the subjects) increased as a function of the security of harms risked, and decreased depending on the number of precautions taken by the character to avoid the potential harms. The subjects were able to make orderly patterns of ratings knowing that the character committed an accident-risking action but without knowing the outcome of that action, suggesting that they are able to arrive at these judgments prior to the occurrence of an actual accident. Further, their pre- and postoutcome judgments were closely related, suggesting that the usual postaccidental judgments of negligence are based on an attempt to infer what the actor could know prior to the accident. Given this demonstration of the usefulness of drawing on the legal system as a source of principles for psychological analyses of attributions of responsibility, several directions for future research are suggested.