Prior research has shown that Japanese blame organizational leaders more harshly than Americans: Americans blame organizational leaders based on the behavior of individual leaders, whereas Japanese blame leaders based both on the behavior of individual leaders and that of the organization. This finding can be explained by a cultural difference in cognitive orientation to focus on the causal influence of groups but also by a cultural difference in value to subordinate individual goals to group goals. By asking Japanese and American respondents to make credit judgments for positive organizational incidents, the current work tests these two rival explanations. Results support the view that group-based crediting occurs because of perceivers' cognitive orientation to perceive group causality. Implications of this cultural difference and the judgmental processes are discussed.

The authors tested a model in which a group's association with an offender impacts collective imprisonment indirectly via dispositional attribution and blame to the group, culture does so indirectly via blame, and severity of outcome directly determines imprisonment. In two experiments, Easterners and Westerners made dispositional attribution, blame, and imprisonment responses to an offender's group associated with him by commission versus omission and with high versus low severity of outcome for the victim. Commission generated higher responses to the group than did omission. Collective blame and imprisonment responses were higher by Easterners than Westerners. The severity of outcome affected imprisonment in Experiment 1. Results of Experiment 1 suggested merit of the two-route causal-moral model; those of Experiment 2 confirmed the model.

Recent research has shown that perceivers who are culturally oriented to focus on the causal influence of groups tend to assign blame to an organization and extend the blame to an individual representing it (i.e. proxy blaming). The present research investigates the mechanism of this blame extension. Results show that it occurs when punishing the organization is impossible rather than possible (Study 1) and that this blaming is brought about by the perception that the target individual is in the role to represent the organization, not by the perception that he/she is the typical member of the culpable organization (Study 2). Implications of these findings in the responsibility literature are discussed.

The current research investigates whether observers blame leaders for organizational accidents even when these managers are known to be causally uninvolved. Past research finds that the public blames managers for organizational harm if the managers are perceived to have personally played a causal role. The present research argues that East Asian perceivers, who are culturally oriented to focus on the causal influence of groups [Menon, T., Morris, M. W., Chiu, C., & Hong, Y. (1999). Culture and the construal of agency: Attribution to individual versus group dispositions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76, 701-717.], blame managers based on the behavior of the group, not only based on the behavior of the individual managers. We argue that perceivers first assign responsibility to the collectivity, the organizational unit or some group within it, and then extend responsibility to the manager representing it. We tested this proposal in a series of studies with a community sample in Japan and matched student samples of Japanese and Americans. Results show that perceivers who are culturally oriented to focus on collective-level causality (Japanese, more so than Americans; Asian Americans, more so than European Americans) blame leaders through proxy logic. Implications of this intuitive logic and of the cultural difference are discussed. (c) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

This study focused on the cultural psychology of control in the United States and Japan. The authors tested a hypothesis that Japanese would tend to overestimate their ability to control their outcomes collectively compared to personally, whereas Americans would show the reverse tendency. As expected, Japanese participants in the group condition, relative to those in the individual condition, were more optimistic about obtaining a favorable outcome. American men, on the other hand, were more optimistic in the individual condition. Interestingly, similar to the Japanese participants, American women showed a reverse but nonsignificant tendency to be more optimistic in the group condition. These results indicate that the psychology of control is both gendered and cultured.