Seeing harm, thinking 'humans' : perceptions of harm prompt human-driven explanations
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- In this dissertation, I examine the causal attributions that people make for negative events and find that the more harmful the consequences of an event are perceived to be, the more likely people are to attribute the event to humans. I find initial evidence for this effect in a secondary analysis of archival data (Studies 1a and 1b). In follow-up experiments, I find that this seems to be specific to human-driven explanations, rather than a search for explanations in general, and that this finding is robust across a wide variety of contexts (Studies 2-6). Furthermore, there is some evidence that this process is at least somewhat restricted to perceptions of harm, not of unexpected or moral outcomes more generally, as I do not find the same effects for perceived helpfulness (Studies 3, 4, and 6). Perceiving harm elicits a desire to understand the event, which leads to attributions to human-driven causes, but not to non-human-driven causes (Study 4). Looking at downstream consequences, I find that attributions to human-driven causes are related to greater support for policies to address the event underlying the harm (Study 5). Finally, this effect holds even in explicit comparisons between events of equal magnitude that vary only with respect to the magnitude of their consequences (Study 6).
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2020; ©2020 |
| Publication date | 2020; 2020 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Fa-Kaji, Naomi Marisa |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Lowery, Brian S, 1974- |
| Thesis advisor | Lowery, Brian S, 1974- |
| Thesis advisor | Halevy, Nir, 1979- |
| Thesis advisor | Martin, Ashley |
| Degree committee member | Halevy, Nir, 1979- |
| Degree committee member | Martin, Ashley |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Graduate School of Business |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Naomi Marisa Fa-Kaji. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Graduate School of Business. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2020. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2020 by Naomi Marisa Fa-Kaji
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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