Year: 2016
Type: article
Abstract: This work examines the extent to which people hold\nindependent sequential events (e.g., players making\ncorrect/incorrect guesses) responsible for overall outcomes\n(e.g., the team winning/losing the game). Two types of\nevents are found to garner the majority of responsibility for\noverall outcomes: (1) final events and (2) events that are\nperceived to disrupt momentum (e.g., an incorrect guess\nafter a sequence of correct guesses). While previous research\nhas shown that final events tend to be perceived as more\nresponsible for overall outcomes, the current experiments\nare the first to document the role of perceived momentum on\nresponsibility judgments. Specifically, we demonstrate that\nthe effect is mediated by perceived momentum changes after\nthe time of the event and moderated when exogenous factors\n(e.g., a delay between events) disrupt perceived momentum.\nWe discuss how these findings relate to pivotality, the\ncounterfactual simulation model, and the role of\nunexpectedness in responsibility judgments.
Language: English
Subfield: General Decision Sciences
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3012554575