A very similar story/psychology test is in the book “The Pigman” written in 1968, but I don’t know if that is the origin of it. There was a brief thread about it here at Straight Dope: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=378202
On page 68-70 of Willow Wilson’s memoir The Butterfly Mosque, she relates a time when one of the instructors at the language school she was attending in Egypt used this question to trigger a discussion between the non-Egyptian and the Egyptian members of the school. The westerners all came down on the side of the murderer being at fault, but the Egyptians all came down on the side of the victim being at fault.
The scenario is slightly different in that the murderer is a known madman on the loose.
Those pages are available for preview on amazon.com if you want to read the details, but basically, the Egyptians were all saying that the woman’s actions put her at fault because she chose to leave her house alone knowing that there was a lunatic running around.
Since this topic actually took off, I would like to mention that the purpose of this question is to demonstrate people’s cognitive bias for what does happen in reality. In legal battles, people do blame the victim leading to situations such as the perpetrator getting less penalty.
Is there a difference between “blaming the victim” and “attributing responsibility”?
I suspect that there is a nuance between the two that can and will colour the responses.
In terms of criminal culpability, there is no doubt that the highwayman is 100% to blame.
However, the woman did a little more than make a poor decision to travel a dangerous road.
- She actively and with aforethought acted dishonestly, lying and sneaking around. (whether she should, or should not have had to is a different discussion)
- She deliberately caused arguments to turn people against her
By doing this, she quite purposely creates an environment that makes the happenstance of bad things much more likely.
I would postulate a slightly different idea (in my next post)…think about this…
Jim is 40 years old. He has a family, with two school aged children. He seldom drinks, only when he is entertaining clients or for work functions. This happens about once a month.
When he has such events to go to he takes a cab, leaving his car at the office so that he does not run the risk of drinking and driving.
One night, he has to go to a function at a particularly unusual venue, and **cannot **get a cab.
He drives, thinking “I will only have two beers to humour my client”.
At the event he drinks way more than two beers due to pressure from the client. He calls for a cab, but the cab company cannot get a driver willing to drive out to the location empty.
He makes the decision to drive home.
Being very careful to stay within the limit, he is on a “enclosed” two lane road (meaning there are pedestrian barriers on both sides to stop people from jaywalking)
Unfortunately, somebody has climbed the barrier, and is crossing the road, dressed in black (at 2AM) and Jim, with reactions slightly slowed by the alcohol hits the jaywalker.
Who is to blame?
Yes. That makes sense. I don’t understand how people could rank the woman #1 if they have to consider the highwayman.
I don’t understand how the ferryman, or any of the lovers, or the husband could be considered at fault at all. None of them acted unreasonably. The ferryman was doing his job, and I doubt the idea of payment in advance was ‘anonymous’. Even if he was being unfriendly or unkind, it it no way makes him responsible for the woman’s actions, or anything that results from them. She was the only one acting unreasonably.
In general I can understand people naming the woman as #1 if they are asked the question without the highwayman being an explicit choice, as Walton stated, he is considered as a constant in the story. I can also see the confusion when presented the entire list of characters, because most of them have no culpability, but the story is told in a way that equates their roles with the woman and the highwayman.
Simplify the story: A woman desperate to continue her betrayal of her husband gets mugged and killed.
Does anybody think the husband or some other party is somehow involved in the crime?
Jim. I don’t see how he is comparable to the woman in the OP. Or are you saying that the woman is like the jaywalker? Even so, Jim is to blame.
In case anyone is too lazy to open the pdf, here is the text of what Schnitte linked to:
It seems to me that the basic idea is: if you piss on my leg and I punch you in the face, who is responsible?
Obviously we are both negligent, but I sure as hell am responsible for committing assault.
Dagnabbit, whippersnaper, OLDER DOES NOT EQUAL RIGHT WING!
Is he? Aside from having slow reactions what did he do wrong? He did not cross centre line, run light, mount kerb, or anything else.
Is Jim the only one you would apportion any responsibility? What if, it could be proven that even though impaired, his reactions were still faster than an 80 year old granny that is legal to drive?
To me, I think that the Highwayman was behaving in exactly the way that we would expect of a highwayman. Which is not to say legal, moral or anything else, or that he is absolved.
Also not to say that what he did was legal.
And the question asks - “who is most responsible” not “who committed an illegal act” or “who should be punished”.
In the story, the lady had to work pretty hard to put herself into such a dangerous situation. And that working pretty hard was not just random stupidity, but rather deliberate and calculated betrayals of more than just one person. Yeah…she bears some responsibility.
ETA - and yeah, I am saying that the woman is somewhat like the jaywalker, if she hadn’t worked so hard at her stupidity and betrayal, she would not have been there in the first place to be run over
Slash does not equal equals.
In the linked PDF, it doesn’t ask ‘who is to blame’, rather ‘who is responsible’ for the death that ensued. Whilst the terms might be interchangeable for most situations, in this one they can elicit quite different outcomes, as our OP has indicated.
IOW, of course the murdered woman bears some responsibility for the crime commited upon her, even if she shares no blame in the event.
Everyone knows the dangers of driving; therefore, if a drunk driver kills another driver, both share at least some of the responsibility/blame.
I know that going outside is dangerous; therefore, I am at least partly responsible or to blame if I go outside.
I know living in a city is dangerous; therefore, if someone breaks into my house and kills me, I am at least partly to blame or responsible.
Or
A Man has to get home because his wife is going into labour and decides to go through a bad part of town instead of waiting until morning, it is at least partly his fault/blame/responsibility when a mugger kills him.
But it’s not like being a highwayman is something thrust upon you. Anyone can decide to steal or murder. By that rationale, we can say that the woman was behaving in exactly the way you’d expect an adulterous person to act–that is, betraying people.
[quote]
In the story, the lady had to work pretty hard to put herself into such a dangerous situation. And that working pretty hard was not just random stupidity, but rather deliberate and calculated betrayals of more than just one person. Yeah…she bears some responsibility.
But does it matter that she was betraying people? Being near the highwayman got her killed. If she were an innocent person who just decided to wander in the dangerous area, she’d still have gotten killed–it’s not like the highwayman knew she was some kind of bad person.
It does and it doesn’t.
Why she was there doesn’t change the nature of the crime. Nor does it change the punishment the Highwayman should face.
But the question doesn’t ask who was the criminal, it asks to rank responsibility.
The woman came into contact with the highwayman not by accident, but by a series of bad and dishonest actions when she was setting out to cheat on her husband and emotionally betray a series of other people. Those actions were very calculated and deliberate. And she should bear some responsibility for making them. I think that, although she is a victim, the victimhood is something of her own engineering.
ETA - what I guess I am trying to say is that “karma caught up with her”…but this presupposes that you believe in a concept of Karma, if you do, the woman is more than a little responsible for her predicament. If you don’t believe in karma, then even the Ferryman has more responsibility in what happened than her
Slight hijack here: What moral responsibility does the highwayman have for the secondary results of the crime? The husband gets not only the news of his wife’s death, but her infidelity. The ferryman and the lovers may feel guilty for not helping her.
The lovers shouldn’t feel guilty, they had no reason to suspect she cared enough about her husband to risk her life. For all the ferryman knew, this was her last trip across the river and she was just trying for a free ride. So are their feelings of guilt their own responsibility (and hers), or does the highwayman share that too? And I can’t see the husband giving a victim’s statement where he says, ‘Your honor, if not for this man’s actions, my wife would be alive and cheating on me today’.
So does a criminal have responsibility for even the unreasonable results of his crime? I think maybe he is criminally, but does that extend to moral culpability as well?
I think any survey regarding the cheating wife story or the drunk driving story will tell us nothing about society’s tendencies to blame the victim, and serve better as examples of the power of bias in storytelling.
One character is the main character of the story, with plenty of details about the mistakes and misdeeds that character made leading up to the incident. The other character is a bit part with no details provided. The cheating wife story could be changed to the “dangerous bridge” instead of the “dangerous neighborhood”, and for all the details we know about him, the victim in the drunk driving story might as well have been a valuable item carelessly left in the road instead of a living breathing human being. It’s not surprising that the focus of the story ends up the being the focus of the blame, without proving anything substantial about society’s willingness to blame the victim.
Sanity, the same narrative goes into court cases of which we can very easily see how people blame the victim. There are numerous psychological studies that test this and come to the same conclusion.
Bangangmo, what you are saying is a perfect example of the Just World Fallacy
Two points -
I believe that the requirement that one must list all actors in order of responsibility slightly muddies the argument. I would like to see single selection - “Who is most responsible”.
The story problem presents the woman as the subject - to me this tends the reader to consider her actions paramount by the simple fact that she is the subject. A skilled story teller could flesh out the other actors and direct the selection of “most responsible” toward any of the actors listed. (e.g. Rashomon)
I suspect some people may indeed be thinking that way.
Try the following:
A woman normally is careful to lock her car doors and roll up the windows, but one day she forgets and leaves her windows rolled halfway down while she runs into the grocery store. When she comes back out, she finds that her iPod, which she had left on the passenger seat, is gone. Whose fault is it that it got stolen?
And now, what if we change the story a little:
A woman normally is careful to lock her car doors and roll up the windows, but one day she forgets and leaves her windows rolled halfway down while she runs into the grocery store. When she comes back out, she finds that her iPod, which she had left on the passenger seat, got soaked in a heavy rain and now won’t work. Whose fault is it that it got ruined?