Restricted accessResearch articleFirst published online 2014-05
Counterfactual reasoning,responsibility and blame for serial murders: the perception and prevention of violent crimes / Razonamiento contrafáctico,responsabilidad y culpa de los asesinatos en serie: la percepción y prevención de los crímenes violentos
The present research evaluates people’s perception of serial murders, analysing the effects of controllability in counterfactual reasoning about the past and the future, as well as attributions of responsibility and blame. Besides, the research analyses the effects of perspective (one’s own versus other people’s) in these attributions. Participants were 442 students who answered open-ended questions designed for this study. The first experiment shows that people focus on controllable factors previous to these events. When considering the avoidance and prevention of general serial murders, they focus on representatives of formal authority. Moreover, when judging from their own perspective, blame is attributed to the perpetrator and responsibility to both parties; while from another person´s perspective, they attribute feelings of either responsibility or guilt to the representatives of formal authority and a lack of these feelings to the perpetrator. The second experiment shows identical results regarding the specific case of a well-known serial killer in England and Spain. These findings demonstrate that this perception has implications for the legal framework and the prevention of violent crimes.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
BennP. (1999). Freedom, resentment, and the psychopath. Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology,6, 29–39.
2.
ByrneR. M. J.SeguraS.CulhaneR.TassoA.BerrocalP. (2000). The temporality effect in counterfactual thinking about what might have been. Memory & Cognition,28, 264–281. doi:10.3758/BF03213805
3.
ByrneR. M. J.TassoA. (1999). Deductive reasoning with factual, possible, and counterfactual conditionals. Memory & Cognition,27, 726–740. doi:10.3758/BF03211565
4.
CatellaniP.MilesiP. (2001). Counterfactuals and roles: Mock victims’ and perpetrators’ accounts of judicial cases. European Journal of Social Psychology,31, 247–264. doi:10.1002/ejsp.39
5.
ChaikinA. L.DarleyJ. M. (1973). Victim or perpetrator?: Defensive attribution of responsibility and the need for order and justice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,25, 268–275. doi:10.1037/h0033948
6.
Daftary-KapurT.DumasR.PenrodD. (2010). Jury decision-making biases and methods to counter them. Legal and Criminological Psychology,15, 133–154. doi:10.1348/135532509X465624
7.
DavisC. G.LehmanD. R.WortmanC. B.SilverR. C.ThompsonS. C. (1995). The undoing of traumatic life events. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,21, 109–124. doi:10.1177/0146167295212002
8.
Devos-CombyL.DevosT. (2001). Social norms, social value, and judgments of responsibility. Swiss Journal of Psychology,60, 35–46. doi:10.1024//1421-0185.60.1.35
9.
EtxebarriaI. (2000). Guilt: An emotion under suspicion. Psicothema,12, 101–108.
10.
EvansJ. St. B. T.NewsteadS. E.ByrneR. M. J. (1993). Human reasoning: The psychology of deduction. Hove: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
11.
FeatherN. T. (1996). Reactions to penalties for an offense in relation to authoritarianism, values, perceived responsibility, perceived seriousness, and deservingness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,71, 571–587. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.71.3.571
HamiltonV. L. (1978a). Who is responsible? Toward a social psychology of responsibility attribution. Social Psychology,41, 316–328. doi:10.2307/3033584
14.
HamiltonV. L. (1978b). Obedience and responsibility: A jury simulation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,36, 126–146. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.36.2.126
15.
HamiltonV. L. (1986). Chains of command: Responsibility attribution in hierarchies. Journal of Applied Social Psychology,16, 118–138. doi:10.1111/j.1559-1816.1986.tb02283.x
16.
HartH. L.HonoréA. M. (1985). Causation in the law (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
17.
HiltonD.McClureJ.SuttonR. M. (2010). Selecting explanations from causal chains: Do statistical principles explain preferences for voluntary causes?. European Journal of Social Psychology,40, 383–400.
18.
HoerlK. (2001). Pain and public deliberation: Citizens, victims, advocates, activists. In Conference Proceedings-National Comunication Association/American Forensic Association (Alta Conference on Argumentation, pp. 2422–2427).
19.
HoerlK. (2002). Monstrous youth in suburbia: Disruption and recovery of the American dream. Southern Communication Journal,67, 259–275. doi:10.1080/10417940209373235
20.
Iglesias-RíoM. A. (2003). La eximente de “anomalía o alteración psíquica”. Una problemática abierta hacia el futuro científico. Anuario de Derecho Penal y Ciencias Penales,LVI(MMIII), 151–173.
21.
KeeneyB. T.HeideK. M. (1995). Serial murder: A more accurate and inclusive definition. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology,39, 298–306.
22.
LagnadoD. A.ChannonS. (2008). Judgments of cause and blame: The effects of intentionality and foreseeability. Cognition,108, 754–770. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2008.06.009
23.
LevyN. (2008a). The responsibility of the psychopath revisited. Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology,14, 129–138. doi:10.1353/ppp.0.0003
LickelB.SchmaderT.HamiltonD. L. (2003). A case of collective responsibility: Who else was to blame for the Columbine high school shootings?. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,29, 194–204. doi:10.1177/0146167202239045
26.
MandelD. R. (2003a). Effect of counterfactual and factual thinking on causal judgements. Thinking and Reasoning,9, 245–265. doi:10.1080/13546780343000231
27.
MandelD. R. (2003b). Judgment dissociation theory: An analysis of differences in causal, counterfactual, and covariational reasoning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General,132, 419–434. doi:10.1037/0096-3445.132.3.419
28.
MandelD. R.LehmanD. R. (1996). Counterfactual thinking and ascriptions of cause and preventability. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,71, 450–463. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.71.3.450
29.
MarkmanK. D.GavanskiI.ShermanS. J.McMullenM. N. (1995). The impact of perceived control on the imagination of better and worse possible worlds. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,21, 588–595. doi:10.1177/0146167295216005
30.
MarkmanK. D.TetlockP. E. (2000). “I couldn’t have known”: Accountability, foreseeability and counterfactual denials of responsibility. The British Journal of Social Psychology,39, 313–325. doi:10.1348/014466600164499
31.
McCloyR.ByrneR. M. J. (2000). Counterfactual thinking about controllable events. Memory & Cognition,28, 1071–1078. doi:10.3758/BF03209355
32.
McEleneyA.ByrneR. M. J. (2006). Spontaneous counterfactual thoughts and causal explanations. Thinking and Reasoning,12, 235–255. doi:10.1080/13546780500317897
33.
McGillA. L.KleinJ. G. (1993). Contrastive and counterfactual reasoning in causal judgment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,64, 897–905. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.64.6.897
34.
MeindlJ. R.EhrlichS. B.DukerichJ. M. (1985). The romance of leadership. Administrative Science Quarterly,30, 78–102. doi:10.2307/2392813
35.
MillerD. T.GunasegaramS. (1990). Temporal order and the perceived mutability of events: Implications for blame assignment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,59, 1111–1118. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.59.6.1111
36.
MorrisM. W.MooreP. C.SimD. L. (1999). Choosing remedies after accidents: Counterfactual thoughts and the focus on fixing human error. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review,6, 579–585. doi:10.3758/BF03212966
37.
ParkinsonB.IllingworthS. (2009). Guilt in response to blame from others. Cognition and Emotion,23, 1589–1614. doi:10.1080/02699930802591594
38.
Pérez-AbellánF. (2005). ¿Mató Tony King a Rocio Wanninkhof?. Madrid: Martínez Roca.
39.
RobbennoltJ. K. (2000). Outcome severity and judgments of “responsibility”: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Applied Social Psychology,30, 2575–2609. doi:10.1111/j.1559-1816.2000.tb02451.x
RoeseN. J.OlsonJ. M. (1995). Counterfactual thinking: A critical overview. In RoeseN. J.OlsonJ. M. (Eds.), What might have been: The social psychology of counterfactual thinking (pp. 1–59). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
42.
RoeseN. J.SummervileA. (2005). What we regret most... and Why. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,31, 1273–1285. doi:10.1177/0146167205274693
43.
Sánchez-LázaroF. G. (2006). Un problema de peligrosidad postdelictual: Reflexiones sobre las posibilidades y límites de la denominada custodia de seguridad. Revista Penal,17, 142–165.
44.
SchlenkerB. R.BrittT. W.PenningtonJ.MurphyR.DohertyK. (1994). The triangle model of responsibility. Psychological Review,101, 632–652. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.101.4.632
45.
SeguraS.McCloyR. (2003). Counterfactual thinking in everyday life situations: Temporal order effects and social norms. Psicológica,24, 1–15.
46.
SeguraS.MorrisM. W. (2005). Scenarios simulations in learning. In MandelD. R.HiltonD. J.CatellaniP. (Eds.), The psychology of counterfactual thinking (pp. 94–109). New York, NY: Routledge.
47.
ShaverK. G. (1970). Defensive attribution: Effects of severity and relevance on the responsibility assigned for an accident. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,14, 101–113. doi:10.1037/h0028777
48.
ShaverK. G. (1985). The attribution of blame. Causality, responsibility, and blameworthiness. New York, NY: Springer-Verlag.
49.
ShultzT. R.JaggiC.SchleiferM. (1987). Assigning vicarious responsibility. European Journal of Social Psychology,17, 377–380. doi:10.1002/ejsp.2420170314
50.
ShultzT.SchleiferM.AltmanI. (1981). Judgments of causation, responsibility, and punishment in cases of harm-doing. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science/Revue Canadienne des Sciences du Comportement,13, 238–253. doi:10.1037/h0081183
51.
SpellmanB. A. (1997). Crediting causality. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General,126, 323–348. doi:10.1037/0096-3445.126.4.323
52.
SpellmanB. A.KincannonA. (2001). The relation between counterfactual (“but for”) and causal reasoning: Experimental findings and implications for jurors’ decisions. Law and Contemporary Problems,64, 241–264. doi:10.2307/1192297
53.
SpellmanB. A.KinncanonA.StoseS. J. (2005). The relation between counterfactual and causal reasoning. In MandelD. R.HiltonD. J.CatellaniP. (Eds.), The psychology of counterfactual thinking (pp. 28–43). New York, NY: Routledge.
54.
TangneyJ. P.DearingR. L. (2002). Shame and guilt. New York, NY: Guilford Press.
55.
VassilevaJ.KossonD.AbramowitzC.ConrodP. (2005). Psychopathy versus psychopathies in classifying criminal offenders. Legal and Criminological Psychology,10, 27–43. doi:10.1348/135532504X15376
56.
VormbaumM. (2007). El desarrollo de la Unión Europea y su influencia sobre el derecho penal europeo. Revista Penal,19, 99–106.
57.
WellsG. L.GavanskiI. (1989). Mental simulation of causality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,56, 161–169. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.56.2.161
58.
WilsonD. (2007). Serial killers: Hunting Britons and their victims 1960–2006. Winchester: Waterside Press.
59.
WrightK. A.PrattT. C.De LisiM. (2008). Examining offending specialization in a sample of male multiple homicide offenders. Homicide Studies,12, 381–398. doi:10.1177/1088767908323930
60.
ZeelenbergM.Van DijkW. W.MansteadA.S.R (1998). Reconsidering the relation between regret and responsibility. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes,74, 254–272. doi:10.1006/obhd.1998.2780
61.
ZembaY.YoungM. J.MorrisM. W. (2006). Blaming leaders for organizational accidents: Proxy logic in collective-versus individual-agency cultures. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes,101, 36–51. doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2006.04.007
62.
ZhangH.ZhouL.LuoY. (2009). The influence of responsibility on the regret intensity: An ERP study. Acta Psychologica Sinica,41, 454–463. doi:10.3724/SP.J.1041.2009.00454
