Sober Second Thought: The Effects of Accountability, Anger, and Authoritarianism on Attributions of Responsibility

Abstract

This experiment explored the joint impact of accountability, anger, and authoritarianism on attributions of responsibility. Participants were either accountable or anonymous while watching an anger-priming or a neutral-emotion-priming video clip. In an ostensibly separate study, participants also were either accountable or anonymous while determining responsibility and punishment in fictional tort cases. As predicted, priming anger both simplified cognitive processing(i.e., reduced the number of cues used in making judgments) and amplified the carryover of self-reported anger to punitive attributions and actual punishment. By contrast, accountability increased the complexity of the judgment process and attenuated the carryover of anger to attributions and punishment. These results generalized across four replication cases that varied in story content; degree of defendant intentionality; and target, type, and severity of harm.