ABSTRACT
Responsibility-for events, for actions, to others-is a central feature of human interaction. Social psychological study of the phenomenon began with the work of Fauconnet (1920) and has proceeded apace in the intervening years, as the chapters in this volume so plainly indicate. Despite having spent the better part of a century studying the antecedents, processes and consequences of responsibility, psychologists are not always as inclusive as they might be in describing the phenomenon. Specifically, too much of current research on responsibility commits the scientific equivalent of the correspondence bias’ (Gilbert, 1998; Jones, 1990): We focus our explanations on the potentially culpable actor, often ignoring the larger social context in which action occurs. In the short space of this chapter we cannot hope to solve this problem, but we do hope to provide a set of broader questions readers might ask when trying to understand how the concept of responsibility is used. We have divided the questions into three general areas. The first describes the social context in which responsibility arises (the who of responsibility). The second suggests circumstances to which the term is applied (the what for of responsibility). The third outlines some of the distinctions that have been made about the process of determining culpability (the how of responsibility assignment). We hope that raising these questions will lead researchers to take a broader view of the process of responsibility attribution.
