Association, Culture, and Collective Imprisonment: Tests of a Two-Route Causal-Moral Model

Abstract

Abstract The authors tested a model in which a group's association with an offender impacts collective imprisonment indirectly via dispositional attribution and blame to the group, culture does so indirectly via blame, and severity of outcome directly determines imprisonment. In two experiments, Easterners and Westerners made dispositional attribution, blame, and imprisonment responses to an offender's group associated with him by commission versus omission and with high versus low severity of outcome for the victim. Commission generated higher responses to the group than did omission. Collective blame and imprisonment responses were higher by Easterners than Westerners. The severity of outcome affected imprisonment in Experiment 1. Results of Experiment 1 suggested merit of the two-route causal-moral model; those of Experiment 2 confirmed the model. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The research reported was supported in part by the National University of Singapore Grants R-581-000-049-112 and R-107-000-112 to Ramadhar Singh. We thank Victor Ottati for his constructive comments on two earlier drafts. Notes 1Participants also assigned blame to and recommended imprisonment for the offender. 2After the main task, participants responded to a social belief survey involving Likert-type 9-point scales, each anchored by 1 (strongly disagree) and 9 (strongly agree). Included in it were two statements about individual agency (“In my country, individuals take control of the situations around them”; “The rules and laws in my country say that individuals should take control of the situations around them”) and two statements about the collective agency of groups (“A coherent group has a will that is stronger than any individual person”; “Organizations chart a direction for themselves”). Americans, relative to Singaporeans, believed more in individual agency but less in the collective agency of groups. Nevertheless, these beliefs did not emerge as covariates of the responses. Note. N = 128. Standard deviations are in parentheses. The independent variables column means with different subscripts differ significantly at p = .05. ns = 64. 3Collective blame had a Culture × Association effect, F(1, 120) = 4.77, p = .03, = .04. In the condition of association by omission, Singaporeans (M = 5.06, SD = 2.06) blamed the group more than did Americans (M = 3.44, SD = 2.30), F(1, 60) = 8.62, p = .005, = .13. There was no difference between Singaporeans (M = 6.34, SD = 1.91) and Americans (M = 6.40, SD = 2.34) in the condition of association by commission, F(1, 60) = 0.01, p = .91. Notably, the difference between omission and commission was three times larger with Americans, F(1, 60) = 25.64, p < .001, = .30, than with Singaporeans, F(1, 60) = 6.46, p = .01, = .10. In collective imprisonment, there was a marginally significant Culture × Severity effect, F(1, 120) = 3.55, p = .06, = .03. In case of low severity of outcome, the recommended imprisonment was shorter by Americans (M = 1.84, SD = 1.52) than by Singaporeans (M = 2.88, SD = 1.88), F(1, 60) = 6.70, p = .01, = .10. In case of high severity of outcome, there was no difference in the recommended imprisonment by Americans (M = 3.12, SD = 2.34) and Singaporeans (M = 3.93, SD = 2.27), F(1, 60) = 3.03, p = .00, = .05. Both of these interactions suggest that Singaporeans, relative to Americans, are chronically more prosecutorial (Tetlock et al., Citation2010). Note. N = 128. Standard deviations are in parentheses. The independent variables column means with different subscripts differ significantly at p = .05. ns = 64. 4In the three-way ANOVA, there was an association × severity effect on dispositional attribution to the group. This two-way interaction arose because the response was lower in the condition of omission-high severity than in the other three conditions. 5The fit of this shortened model to the data of Experiment 1 was poor, χ2(5) = 33.06, p < .001, NNFI = .49, IFI = .76, RMSEA = .21, SRMR = .10.