Social Variability in Moral Judgments – Analyzing the Justification of Actions Using the Prescriptive Attribution Concept

Abstract

In 1958 Fritz Heider published his groundbreaking monograph “The psychology of interpersonal relations.” For social psychologists it proved to be a rich source of conceptual ideas and gave rise to some of the “grand” theories of the discipline (e.g. balance theory, theory of justice, and attribution theory). From our perspective, however, the book in its theoretical richness is not yet fully appreciated (Gollan and Witte 2008), especially the 8th chapter with the title “Ought and Values”. For instance, Heider (1958) conceives ‘oughts’ and ‘values’ as people’s culturally shared concepts of what should be attained or done. They refer to what people consider to be “right” or “wrong” and are therefore crucial elements in moral behavior, ethical decision-making, and ethical justification. In our chapter, we adopt Heider’s idea of “rights” and “wrongs” in social contexts and combine it with another of Heider’s notions that has received even more attention: causal attribution. We argue below that this juxtaposition of ideas represents a logical precursor to the concept of prescriptive attribution (Witte and Doll 1995). We will (1) introduce the prescriptive attribution concept by its formal analysis, (2) report two extensions to the model that were included as a consequence of empirical studies, (3) present two measures that offer operationalizations of prescriptive attributions, and finally (4) report empirical results describing specific factors that influence how prescriptive attributions are construed in everyday life.