Who Is to Blame When Spreading Behavior Cascades Into Harm? Blame Attribution Traces the Causal Chain of Actions

We live in an increasingly interconnected world where people's influence spreads through social networks and media with unprecedented speed. Yet, our knowledge about how people attribute blame in causal chains of spreading human actions is limited. We propose that people trace the causal origin in a sequence of interconnected human actions and blame the initiator of the causal chain for the negative consequences at its end. Four experiments (N = 1,777) show that people trace causal origin in action sequences to the second degree of separation and regard this causal inference as the basis of blame attribution. People also take into account the multiplying effect of junctions in action sequences and attribute more blame to initiators of causal chains when the cascading effects lead to more severe consequences. The findings support the social functionalist approach to naïve blame attribution in human causal chains.