Perceptions of interdependence and judgments of collective responsibility

Models and discussion of responsibility judgments focus on the responsibility of individuals who are the primary cause of blameworthy events. Less attention has been paid to instances in which other persons, beyond the individual who caused the event, are also held responsible. Such instances, which can be referred to as instances of collective responsibility, were the focus of the research presented in this dissertation.; Collective responsibility was hypothesized to be based in the perception that members of a group are interpersonally interdependent with the person who committed a wrong-doing. The perception of interdependence is proposed to influence judgments of collective responsibility by influencing two causal inferences that lay people may make regarding negative events. These inferences are that the other members of the group may have indirectly facilitated or encouraged the negative action (referred to as an inference of commission) or that they failed to prevent the negative action (referred to as an inference of omission). Thus, it was proposed that inferences of commission and omission mediate the relationship between perceptions of interdependence and judgments of collective responsibility.; Four studies tested this basic model, and several extensions of it, using a variety of empirical strategies. Study 1 was a large-scale correlational study in which participants judged the degree of interdependence, collective responsibility, and the applicability of inferences of commission and omission for a sample of thirty groups. Study 2 was an experimental study in which perceptions of interdependence were manipulated and the effects of this manipulation on inferences of commission and omission and judgments of collective responsibility were examined. Studies 3 and 4 examined the ability of the model to make sense of people's reactions to a real-world event---the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. The results of all four studies supported the proposed model and suggest that perceivers do have well developed ideas of when and why collective responsibility should be assigned. The model developed in this dissertation provides an initial framework for understanding how these judgments are made.