Wednesday, March 5, 2025

A praise-blame asymmetry

There is a certain kind of symmetry between praise and blame. We praise someone who incurs a cost to themselves by going above and beyond obligation and thereby benefitting another. We blame someone who benefits themselves by failing to fulfill an obligation and thereby harming another.

But here is a fun asymmetry to note. We praise the benefactor in proportion to the cost to the benefactor. But we do not blame the malefactor in proportion to the benefit to the malefactor. On the contrary, when the benefit to the malefactor is really small, we think the malefactor is more to be blamed.

1 comment:

  1. This made me think of the Knobe effect and sent me down a wee rabbit hole - there's a cool paper by Guglielmo and Malle (2019) arguing that (cognitively speaking) blame seems to be more complicated than praise, in that we seem to take mental states and consequences more into account for blame than for praise https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0213544

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