Attributions of Responsibility for Military Misconduct: Constraint, Identification, and Severity

ABSTRACT

Although a great deal of research and theory in social psychology has addressed issues surrounding the attribution of moral responsibility, a paucity of research has examined a topic of continuing importance, the ascription of moral responsibility for acts of violence and brutality committed in the context of military engagement. The present study attempts to extend earlier research into the mechanisms of lay moral cognition to investigate the attribution of moral responsibility for acts committed in the extreme circumstances of armed conflict. Two experiments, conducted on two different populations of participants (civilian undergraduates or military academy cadets) examined a scenario depicting military misconduct. In both experiments, participants assigned responsibility to a soldier whose conduct expressed his evaluative orientation toward the behavior, even when he was highly coerced.

KEYWORDS:

• Attribution
• identification
• military
• constraint
• severity
• responsibility
• ethics

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Notes

1. For exploratory analysis, we also asked participants to respond to items pertaining to degree of culpability of Lieutenant Fiske, Private Robinson’s leader, who gave the orders and applied various levels of constraint. Because these findings are not germane to our main hypotheses, they are not reported here, but are available on request from the first author.