Personal and Situational Determinants of Attribution of Responsibility for an Accident

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to examine the hypothesis that self-protective attribution of responsibility for accidents is a function of personal relevance, situational relevance, and severity of the accident's consequences. As predicted, high personal and high situational relevance between the accident perpetrator and the subject-observers lessened their attributions of responsibility for a severe accident relative to a mild one, whereas low personal and high situational relevance increased their assignment of responsibility for a severe accident. Furthermore, the variability of subjects' responsibility attributions was significantly greater when both relevance cues were present than when they were absent. These findings were taken as evidence for two self-protective attribution tendencies: (1) "blame-avoid-ance," in which the observer is motivated to eschew blame should he become involved in a severe accident, and (2) "harm-avoidance, " in which the observer is motivated to preclude a severe accident from happening to himself. Situational relevance appeared to be a necessary condition for the arousal of self-protective attribution in that neither blame-nor harm-avoidance occurred under low situational relevance.