Responsibility: Cognitive fragments and collaborative coherence?

We describe additional research that expands upon many of Doris's points, focusing on collaboration (Ch. 5), selves, and identity (Ch. 8). We also suggest some elaboration of his treatment of dual process theories (Ch. 3). Finally, we ask whether collaborationist accounts confer logical consistency.

The "Bad Is Black" Effect: Why People Believe Evildoers Have Darker Skin Than Do-Gooders.

Across six studies, people used a "bad is black" heuristic in social judgment and assumed that immoral acts were committed by people with darker skin tones, regardless of the racial background of those immoral actors. In archival studies of news articles written about Black and White celebrities in popular culture magazines (Study 1a) and American politicians (Study 1b), the more critical rather than complimentary the stories, the darker the skin tone of the photographs printed with the article. In the remaining four studies, participants associated immoral acts with darker skinned people when examining surveillance footage (Studies 2 and 4), and when matching headshots to good and bad actions (Studies 3 and 5). We additionally found that both race-based (Studies 2, 3, and 5) and shade-based (Studies 4 and 5) associations between badness and darkness determine whether people demonstrate the "bad is black" effect. We discuss implications for social perception and eyewitness identification.

Justice is not blind: visual attention exaggerates effects of group identification on legal punishment.

Why do some people demand harsher legal punishments than do others after viewing the same video evidence? We predict that inconsistent patterns of punishment decisions can be reconciled by considering the simultaneous effects of social group identification and visual attention. We tested 2 competing predictions--the attention unites and attention divides hypotheses--to understand whether visual attention exaggerates or eliminates differences in legal decision making as a function of social identification with outgroups. We measured social identification with police (Studies 1a, 1b) or manipulated identification with a novel outgroup (Study 2). Participants watched videos depicting physical altercations in which the targets' culpability was ambiguous. We surreptitiously tracked (Studies 1a, 2) or manipulated (Study 1b) visual attention to outgroup targets. Results support the attention divides hypothesis. Among participants who fixated frequently on outgroup targets, prior identification influenced punishment decisions. This relationship did not emerge among participants who fixated infrequently on the target. Subjective interpretations of and accurate recall for targets' actions mediated the relationship between identification and attention on punishment. We discuss implications for bias in legal decision making and policy.