Yaseen Ismail, Sifana Sohail and Yarrow Dunham
Affiliation: Yale University
Category: Psychology
Keywords: Just World Belief (JWB), Blame mitigation, Structural inequality
Date: Tuesday 2nd of September
Time: 15:30
Location: Room 154 (154)
View the full session: Blame & the Knobe Effect
We are often outraged when someone commits a morally offensive act. However, learning new context, such as that the individual experienced abuse as a child, can shift our response from blame to compassion. One approach to understanding these responses is historicism, a view in which actions are explained by the context of the actor’s life history. Gill and Cerce (2017) found that presenting immoral actions alongside a “historicist narrative”, describing the actor’s unfortunate life history, led to a decrease in moral outrage.
However, it remains to be understood how and when historicist thinking is deployed. For example, Gill and Pizzuto (2022) found that when white American individuals were presented with a historicist narrative for a black offender and a white offender, they subsequently reduced their blame for the white offender but not the black offender. This was especially present for white participants with low “societal historicism”, denying that current societal-level intergroup disparities are shaped by a history of racial oppression. Such research suggests that the influence of personal historicist narratives in blame mitigation may be contextualised by intergroup societal beliefs and racial bias. However, the logical connection between intergroup beliefs and historicist blame mitigation does not immediately follow, as personal historicist narratives do not rely upon any intergroup content or belief in systematic oppression. They should thus be interpreted equally regardless of intergroup society historicism beliefs.
To further understand the relationship between intergroup beliefs and historicist thinking, we collected data from 194 (149 White, 25 Black, 20 Other) American participants, who were asked to rate their moral outrage for offenders in a 2x2 independent groups design (Seeing a historicist narrative describing the offender’s challenging childhood or seeing a neutral narrative, seeing a black offender or white offender). Participants also reported their societal historicism, Just World Belief (JWB) – the belief that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people, and lay historicism – the general belief that people are shaped by their pasts. We explored the interaction between these factors, with particular interest in the relationship between JWB and lay historicism, as JWB is often associated with victim blaming and thus may reduce the impact of historicism.
Contrary to past work, participants displayed higher moral outrage for the white offenders compared to the black offenders in both the historicist narrative and neutral narrative conditions. These findings were generally explained by the dispositional measures. Participants appeared to selectively apply the belief of a just world according to racial context, with JWB predicting increased outrage for white individuals but not black individuals. Similarly, individuals scoring high in lay historicist thinking demonstrated increased outrage for white offenders but reduced outrage for black offenders.
Given that our sample showed a prevalence of high societal historicism, participants likely believed that white individuals face comparative privilege and reduced oppression compared to black individuals and were thus less sensitive to their personal life narratives and harsher in just world thinking. Such results demonstrate how historicist thinking may be contextualised according to pre-existing intergroup beliefs. References:
Gill, M. J., & Cerce, S. C. (2017). He never willed to have the will he has: Historicist narratives, “civilized” blame, and the need to distinguish two notions of free will. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 112(3), 361–382. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000073
Gill, M. J., & Pizzuto, A. (2022). Unwilling to Un-Blame: Whites who dismiss historical causes of societal disparities also dismiss personal mitigating information for Black offenders. Social Cognition, 40(1), 55–87. https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2022.40.1.55