Blame and Prevention as Sources of Bias in Causal Explanations of Accidents

This paper examines bias in causal explanations for organizational accidents caused by organizationally defined processing goals. Participants in an experiment were asked to determine the cause of a ferryboat accident, and were assigned the processing goal of assissing blame or preventing future accidents. Participants assigned the processing goal of assessing blame generally identified a single person as the cause of the accident, while participants assigned the processing goal of preventing future accidents generally identified multiple system causes. A second study finds that the task language made the processing goals more influential on causal reasoning than a more general role assignment with the same processing goal. The research study has implications for both the study of causal reasoning in an organizational context and the organizational design of accident investigation teams.