Abstract

The present paper is purposed to categorize and summarize researches related to the attribution of responsibility and the assignment of punishment for an accident, and to propose a hypohetical model of punishment assignment. Since Heider(1958) suggested that the attribution of personal responsibility varies with the relative contribution of environmental factors to the outcome, many researchers have tried to identify the variables contributing to the attribution of responsibility and the assignment of punishment. But there are the possibility that the meaning of the dependent variable(eg, responsibility) used in these researches-were varied to the research contexts. Thus I tried to clarify the concept of responsibility by dividing it into fault, responsibility, and punishment. And these three concepts are connected in a model. I mention the important psychological mechanisms in each judgments and several hypotheses driven from the model.