Focal and Background Actors

Focal and Background Actors

We propose that the mutability of any aspect of a situation increases when attention is directed to it and that unattended aspects tend to become part of the presupposed background. The hypothesis that the attributes of a focal object or agent are more mutable than those of nonfocal ones was explored by D. Read (1985). In the card-game study described earlier, he showed subjects the hands of two players, A and B, and asked them to “complete stems such as, “A would have won if . . .” or “A would have lost if. . . .” The large majority of completions involved changes in the hand held by A, although the same outcome could have been generated just as well by altering B’s hand. Other tests of the hypothesis used vignettes such as the following:

Helen was driving to work along a three-lane road, where the middle lane is used for passing by traffic from both directions. She changed lanes to pass a slow-moving truck, and quickly realized that she was headed directly for another car coming in the opposite direction. For a moment, it looked as if a collision was inevitable. However, this did not occur. Please indicate in one sentence how you think the accident was avoided.

The situation of the two cars is symmetric, or perhaps biased against Helen’s being able to do much to prevent the accident, given that the circumstances of the other car are not described. Nevertheless, a substantial majority of subjects completed the story by ascribing the critical action to Helen.

The idea that the actions of a focal individual are mutable may help explain the well-documented tendency for victims of violence to be assigned an unreasonable degree of responsibility for their fate (Lerner & Miller, 1978). Information about a harmful act often presents the actions of the perpetrator in a way that makes them part of the presupposed background of the story, and therefore relatively immutable Alternatives to the victim’s actions are likely to be more mutable, and counterfactual scenarios in which the harm is avoided are therefore likely to be ones that change the victim’s actions but keep the aggressor’s behavior essentially constant. The high availability of such counterfactual scenarios can induce an impression that the victim is responsible for her fate – at least in the sense that she could easily have altered it. Any factor that increases the attention focused on the victim increases the availability of alternatives to the victim’s reactions and the blame attached to the victim. The finding that emotional involvement with victims can increase the blame attributed to them (Lerner, 1980) is consistent with this speculation.

Our analysis is based on the idea that features of a situation that have highly available alternatives are attributed greater causal effectiveness than equally potent but less mutable factors. This analysis does not imply, of course, that causal responsibility is never assigned where it belongs. Probes that draw attention to the perpetrator, such as those concerning the punishment to be given, can be expected to evoke appropriate degrees of blame. The point made here is simply that the actions of the perpetrator, unless made salient, are likely to be presupposed, with the result that constructed scenarios of how the victimization might have been avoided will focus on the actions of the victim. Although seemingly paradoxical, it is not a new discovery that apparent immutability reduces attributions of responsibility. This fact has been known to bullies since time immemorial.

The hypotheses that we have discussed illustrate, but do not exhaust, the factors that control the differential mutability of attributes and the differential availability of alternatives to reality. In other exploratory work we have found suggestive support for several additional hypotheses. One of these hypotheses is that temporal order affects mutability. Consider the pair of consonants XF. Now quickly change it by replacing one of the letters by another consonant. Which letter did you change? A robust majority of respondents replace the second letter rather than the first. This example illustrates a general rule: The second member of an ordered pair of events is likely to be more mutable than the first. Another hypothesis is that a change that can be visualized (e.g., undoing an accident) is more available than a change that cannot be visualized (e.g., undoing a heart attack).