The Advantage of Internal Causal Accounts: How Explanation Style and Harm Severity Shape Responsibility Attribution and Punishment Recommendations

The purpose of this research is to examine the combined effects of an action's consequences and the author's justifications on judgments of intentionality and culpability in the context of judicial decision-making. Our primary goal is to extend the scope of Knobe's (2003) work, which demonstrates that people tend to judge actions with positive consequences as more intentional than those with negative consequences. However, in a legal context, only actions with negative consequences are subject to judgment. We hypothesize that an action will be judged as more intentional when its consequences are severe rather than moderate. Additionally, we hypothesize that if the perpetrator assumes responsibility for the act (rather than rejecting it through an external explanation), he will be judged less severely when he explains his acts by assuming that he is the originator of the consequences