Intuitions about trait responsibilities

Popular depictions of mental life often feature a bustling society of personality traits—distinctive characters whose actions collectively determine behavior, much like how the actions of individual people collectively determine the behavior of a group. Do these depictions capture something important about folk psychology? One implication is that people should reason about trait responsibility similarly to how they reason about personal responsibility in groups. To test this implication quantitatively, we first collected data on judgments about the predictive relationship between traits and actions (Experiment 1), and then elicited trait responsibility judgments for the same actions (Experiment 2). The data from Experiment 1 were used to construct models of responsibility attribution (adapted from prior work on personal responsibility in groups), which we then compared to data from Experiment 2. We found that participants treated personality traits as entities that can bear responsibility for behavior, and their responsibility judgments were best explained by an actual contribution model that assigns responsibility based on a trait’s predictive contribution to behavior. In contrast to findings from studies of personal responsibility, counterfactual-style models did not fare as well. These findings reveal both similarities and differences between responsibility attribution to traits within a person vs. people within a group.