verdict: The emergence process in the allocation of blame

The primary goal of this research was to determine if the emergence process of action identification could be applied to the way a person perceives another's actions and therefore predict contrasting judgments of right and wrong. Specifically, subjects read transcripts depicting a crime of either grand theft or murder under an induced high or low level of action identification, followed by one of two closing arguments which summarized the position of either the defense or the prosecution. Judgments of blame were obtained from all subjects. Results suggest that the emergence process is more general than originally conceived and can be applied to person perception. As predicted, compared to high level subjects, low level subjects who read about the crime of grand theft, were more influenced by whatever closing argument they read. Implications and future research directions are discussed.