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Human beings love to find explanations for things. Spend time with any 5-year-old child, and you know they love to ask, “Why?” The desire to understand why things happen continues throughout life—and it affects our ability to assign blame for an action.

We assign blame according to our ability to come up with "counterfactual statements" that begin with “If only…” Suppose, for example, two children are playing catch with a football in the living room of a house. One of them throws the ball too hard, and it hits an expensive vase. We might blame the child who threw the ball by saying, “If only he had not thrown the ball too hard, the vase would not have broken.” Or, we might blame both children by saying, “If only they had played catch outside, the vase would not have broken.”

Research reveals that we usually assign blame to people based on these two factors:

1. They do a concrete action leading to harmful consequence.

According to Jonathan Baron and his colleagues, someone is blamed more often if they do a concrete action—people assign blame less often when someone fails to act, even though the consequences could be as severe. For example, if a man pushes someone over and she gets hurt, we blame the man for hurting the woman. We reason that if he had not pushed her, she would not have gotten hurt. But suppose the man watches a woman about to walk into a bench that she does not see. He does not tell her about the bench, and she trips over it, falls, and gets hurt. The man might have prevented the accident by speaking out, but we don’t think he is (as much) to blame. In part, his inaction is not seen as much of a cause of the woman getting hurt; even if he had spoken up, it is possible she still would have fallen.

2. They had full knowledge of the potential risk.

According to Elizabeth Gilbert, Elizabeth Tenney, Christopher Holland, and Barbara Spellman in the May, 2015 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, we blame people more often for actions when they have knowledge that they could have acted on. For example, if the children playing catch in the living room are 2 years old, we blame them less for the broken vase than if they are 10 years old. They are seen as "less culpable" given their lack of awareness of potential harm.

Try this thought experiment to see how you would assign blame:

Sarah borrows a car from Josh. It turns out that the car has brake problems. Josh told Sarah about the faulty brakes. Sarah drives a little recklessly and gets in an accident that hurts another person. What was the cause of the accident?

Sarah, and the brakes of the car

Josh, because he knew about the brake condition

Sarah, because Josh told her about the brake condition and she drove recklessly regardless

Without knowledge, people think Sarah and the brakes of the car are the cause of the accident. However, if Josh knew that the brakes had a problem and did not tell Sarah, then people think that Josh is actually more to blame than Sarah: If he had told her, then she might have driven differently. In a third condition, Josh knew that the brakes had a problem and did tell Sarah, but she drove recklessly anyhow. Now, Sarah is once again seen as more blameworthy, because she had enough knowledge to act more responsibly. The knowledge a person is perceived to have determines whether others will blame them.

Another study in this series looked at the counterfactuals people create. The scenario in this study involved a woman the grass at her house with a lawnmower that is defective. The lawnmower spins out of control and cuts her prize tulips. In one condition, the woman does not know the lawnmower is defective. In the other, her mechanic has told her the mower is defective.

Participants were asked to generate several “If only” statements and to rate whether each counterfactual statement could have occurred and whether the woman could have controlled whether that happened. They also rated the woman’s blame for destroying the tulips.

Participants thought the woman was more to blame when she knew the lawnmower was defective than when she did not know. The reason was that when the woman knew the lawnmower was defective, people were more likely to think that she could have done something (like buy a new lawnmower) that would have fixed the problem and spared the tulips. So, there was a direct link between the counterfactuals people created and the blame they assigned the woman.

Ultimately, when we are trying to understand the causes of events in our world, we reason about the way the world could have been had people taken different actions. When we think that people could have easily taken an action that would have led to a different outcome, we blame them for that outcome. Knowledge is one key factor that makes us believe that a person could have acted differently.

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