Reconsidering Motivation to Blame and the Distinction Between Private and Public Blame

Psychological Inquiry, 25: 197–200 DOI: 10.1080/1047840X.2014.901131 Reconsidering Motivation to Blame and the Distinction between Private and Public Blame Christopher W. Bauman University of California, Irvine Elizabeth Mullen George Washington University Malle, Guglielmo, and Moore (2014) offer a cohesive and expansive perspective on blame that includes impressive efforts to organize, clarify, and advance an area of research that has enjoyed considerable attention across multiple decades. As is often the case with prospering topics, the literature on blame and related constructs does not suffer from a shortage of partially overlapping terms that sometimes are defined imprecisely. Therefore, the paper makes a clear contribution by offering explicit and thorough treatment of how to situate blame within a nomological network that has been only partially or implicitly addressed in past research. Additionally, the Path Model of Blame subsumes prior models and offers new insights that address limitations of past work. The model is clearly specified and simple relative to its explanatory power. Simplicity, however, is a double-edged sword. Malle et al. (2014) explain in detail how their Path Model of Blame does not require additional components to (a) accommodate some seemingly inconsistent views and (b) account for “problematic” phenomena that often pose challenges to models of blame. Even if the model is capable of handling these issues without revision, it may understate the role of some important sources of variability in blame judgments. We view the issues we raise in our commentary as potential opportunities to fine tune and extend a well-crafted theory. Specifically, we suggest that research on motivation to blame is not necessarily incompatible with the Path Model of Blame because the CIV (concept activation, information acquisition, value setting) layer appears to include functionally equivalent processes. Additionally, we believe it may be useful to further differentiate between private and social blame. We hope our ideas help to build a complete theory of blame that represents and explains all facets of the phenomenon. Motivation to Blame and Microprocesses that Underpin Blame Criteria Malle et al. (2014) introduce the Path Model of Blame as a means to represent the criteria people use to determine whether and how much to blame others (i.e., event detection, intentionality, obligation, capacity, reasons). They take great care to explain that the model is conceptual; it should not be misinterpreted as implying a rigid, temporal order or deliberate conscious reasoning. To add additional explanatory power, Malle et al., also present the CIV layer, which addresses factors that influence how people gather and weigh information germane to each criterion (i.e., “microprocesses”). Together, the Path Model of Blame and the CIV layer identify major components of blame judgments and provide a framework that provides theoretical space for a host of social-cognitive processes that influence blame. At the same time, however, Malle et al. devote considerable attention to questioning theories that feature motivated blame on both conceptual and empirical grounds. We believe Malle et al. (2014) may have prematurely dismissed the concept of motivation to blame because components of the CIV layer appear to accommodate it. In short, the “blame-early” processing that Malle et al. argue against, appears to be consistent with some of the information processing that occurs at each node of the Path Model. Given that the order of the Path Model is conceptual, the difference between it and “blame-early” models may be slight. When discussing the CIV layer, Malle et al. (2014) posit that people often take cognitive shortcuts when processing information relevant to blame criteria. One class of shortcuts is preset values, which includes dispositional inferences and expectations for behavior (e.g., “Monisha tends to be reckless;” “the rival always intentionally harms us”). From our perspective, it is difficult to differentiate the notion of a preset value from that of a motivation to blame.