To Blame is Human: A Quantitative Systematic Review of the Relationship Between Outcome Severity of Large‐Scale Crises and Attributions of Blame

Abstract

In crisis situations, time is of the essence. Effective messaging to individuals at risk is critical to mitigating the most severe outcomes. Extant crisis communication literature has focused on differentiating crisis types based on perceived blame, particularly in cases of for-profit company malfeasance, but less work has been done to understand how the public makes these types of attributions. This quantitative systematic review investigates the relationship between severity of a large-scale crisis outcome and attributions of blame toward relevant entities. Moderators of interest include the attribution term used with participants (e.g., blame, responsibility), the type of crisis event, and the entity presented as at fault. Overall, a small but significant positive relationship is identified in the majority of studies between severity of a large-scale crisis outcome and attributions of blame. Results suggest that while crisis type and entity to blame are moderators, the attribution term(s) used with participants plays a less significant role. Implications and future directions are considered.

Stopping the Spread: How Blame Attributions Drive Customer-to-Customer Misbehavior Contagion and What Frontline Employees Can Do to Curb It

“…219–221) further specify that people will be more likely to engage in attributional search “when the outcome is severe…because a more threatening event demands an explanation to help the victim create a sense of meaning.” This reasoning aligns with extant empirical work. For example, Shaver (1970) first found and formalized a positive link between outcome severity and responsibility attributions in his defensive attribution theory, while more recent meta-analyses confirm this positive relationship ( Gilbert 2021 ; Robbennolt 2000 ). Thus, we posit controllability judgments (and thus FLE-directed blame attributions) to be greater, the higher customers judge the severity of other customers’ C2C misbehavior.…”