Judgments of Responsibility for Inequality: A Framework and Review

Decades of psychological research have led to a better understanding of the factors that influence people’s causal explanations of inequalities, such as the racial wealth gap. But our understanding of the psychology of inequality remains limited because this research has largely focused on causal and retrospective judgments. In this article, we argue that two distinctions are valuable for clarifying judgments of responsibility for inequality: the moral–causal distinction and the retrospective–prospective distinction. The moral–causal distinction differentiates judgments of agents’ blameworthiness and obligation (moral) from judgments of their contribution to an outcome (causal). The retrospective–prospective distinction differentiates judgments about the agents, actions, and conditions that led to historical or present inequalities (retrospective) from judgments about what agents can or should do to remedy existing inequalities and prevent them in the future (prospective). We summarize existing research on how sociocultural, emotional, motivational, and cognitive factors affect the four categories of judgments defined by this framework. In doing so, we identify important gaps and highlight directions for future research that will allow us to better explain, predict, and shape judgments relating to inequality.