Credit And Blame

CREDIT AND BLAME CREDIT AND BLAME Charles Tilly Princeton University Press Princeton and Oxford Copyright © 2008 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tilly, Charles. Credit and blame, Charles Tilly. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-691-13578-6 (hbk. : alk. paper) 1. Attribution (Social psychology) 2. Responsibility. 3. Blame. 4. Justice. I. Title. HM1076.T54 2008 302⬘.12—dc22 2007045225 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Electra and American Gothic Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ press.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 CONTENTS Preface vii 1 Credit, Blame, and Social Life 1 2 Justice 31 3 Credit 61 4 Blame 91 5 Memories of Victory, Loss, and Blame 120 Notes 153 References 161 Index 173 PREFACE We humans spend our lives blaming, taking credit, and (often more reluctantly) giving credit to other people. Viable visions of life can include varying proportions of credit and blame, but none of us escapes the urge to assign value— positive or negative—to other people’s actions, as well as our own. That is so, I speculate, because evolution has organized our brains to create accounts of actions and interactions in which X does Y to Z. X causes Y to happen, and Z bears the consequences. We don’t simply observe X-Y-Z sequences dispassionately, as if we were watching how falling raindrops form a puddle on a windowsill. Instead, we assign moral weight to those sequences, deciding many times each day (usually without much reflection) whether we or someone else did the right thing. What’s more, we want doing the right thing to receive rewards and doing the wrong thing to receive punishments. This book focuses on how we humans relate just rewards and punishments to other people’s actions, and to our own. Over a half century of research, writing, and teaching, most of my professional work has concerned large-scale political processes such as revolutions, social movements, and transformations of states. Anyone who has studied these sorts of processes—or, for that matter, takes part in them—sees credit and blame everywhere. Political leaders (often unjustly) take credit for their regimes’ accomplishments, blame vii PREFACE viii their enemies or underlings when things go wrong, and sometimes award their supporters medals, titles, and sinecures. Just as much crediting and blaming occurs in other social settings, from big corporations to modest households. At all scales, credit and blame pervade social life. In 2006, Princeton University Press published a little book of mine. I called it simply Why? The book asked what happens as people give other people reasons for things they have done, things they have seen, and things other people have done. The book gave two connected answers to the question. First, reason-givers choose among four different sorts of reasons: conventions in the style of “Life is tough,” codes in the style of “Those are the rules, and I followed them,” technical accounts in the style of “Let me tell you what we doctors think causes this illness,” and stories in the style of “Jerry got mad at Joe, and slugged him.” Second, even for an identical event, reason-givers offer systematically different reasons to different receivers depending on the relationship between them; we take for granted that a psychiatrist will give a nervous mother a different