Systematic blame: Examining the process of blame, its social expression, and the role of
moral values
Andrew E. Monroe
Florida State University
University of Pennsylvania
Over the past 20 years, moral judgment has typically been described as a motivated process
wherein peopleʼs intuitive desire to blame biases information processing and results in a
tendency to over-blame others. Yet, such a process of blame would be largely maladaptive and
incongruent with using blame for everyday social-regulation. I present new data examining how
people make and update blame judgments. These data show that rather than being a motivated
process, blaming is best described as a systematic process during which people carefully attend
to and use causal and mental state information to make blame judgments. While systematic
blame best captures everyday moral judgment, I discuss several possible limits to systematic
blaming, including: Judging different moral tribes, power constraining the expression of blame,
and moral beliefs biasing ascriptions of minds.
Monroe Bio:
Dr. Monroe is a post-doctoral fellow at Florida State University and the University of
Pennsylvania. He received his Masterʼs degree in Social Psychology from Illinois State
University in 2007, and he received his PhD from Brown University in 2012.
In my research, I examine how inferences about the minds of others shape moral judgments,
folk concepts, and social behavior. More specifically, I am interested in the information
processing dynamics of making and updating moral judgments and how emotion might alter
information processing. I have done extensive work developing a folk concept of free will and
testing how this concept is deployed to navigate everyday life. Most recently, I have begun
exploring the social aspect of blame. I test the differences between peopleʼs cognitive
judgments of blame and the social expression of blame, and I examine how peopleʼs moral
values influence the way they perceive others.