1 Culpable Control and Counterfactual Reasoning in the Psychology of Blame Mark D. Alicke Ohio University Justin Buckingham Towson University Ethan Zell Ohio University Teresa Davis Middle Tennessee State University elicit more causal reasoning than favorable ones (Boninger, Gleicher, & Strathman, 1994; Johnson, 1986). Yet another reason for scrutinizing harmful events is to avoid being victimized by them (Burger, 1981; Shaver, 1970). Finally, emotional reactions to a victim’s suffering may impel observers to analyze the causes of the victim’s misfortune. Ordinary explanations of harmful events differ markedly from formal scientific explanations. Whereas scientific explanations identify universal laws that asso- ciate antecedent and consequent events, ordinary expla- nations devolve on specific episodes (Antaki & Fielding, 1981; Hart & Honore, 1959; Hilton & Slugoski, 1986). For example, a woman who was trying to understand why she was assaulted would be relatively uninformed by sociological explanations about economic decline. Rather, she wants to know why she was assaulted at a particular place and time. Causal candidates might include changing her route to work because she was in a hurry. Although route changes are not universally linked to assault, they provide the key to understanding this particular event. As Hart and Honore emphasize in their discussion of causation in the law, people explain harmful events by identifying abnormal conditions that Authors’ Note: Please address correspondence to Mark D. Allicke, Department of Psychology, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701; e-mail: alicke@ohio.edu. PSPB, Vol. XX No. X, Month XXXX xx-xx DOI: 10.1177/0146167208321594 © 2008 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc. Many counterfactual reasoning studies assess how people ascribe blame for harmful actions. By itself, the knowledge that a harmful outcome could easily have been avoided does not predict blame. In three studies, the authors showed that an outcome’s mutability influ- ences blame and related judgments when it is coupled with a basis for negative evaluations. Study 1 showed that mutability influenced blame and compensation judgments when a physician was negligent but not when the physician took reasonable precautions to prevent harm. Study 2 showed that this finding was attenuated when the victim contributed to his own demise. In Study 3, whether an actor just missed arriving on time to see his dying mother or had no chance to see her influenced his blameworthiness when his reason for being late provided a basis for negative evaluations, but made no difference when there was a positive reason for the delay. These findings clarify the conditions under which an outcome’s mutability is likely to influence blame and related attributions. Keywords: blame; counterfactual; causation; culpability H armful events are fodder for attributional investiga- tion. One reason why harmful events provoke attri- butional activity is that they are often unexpected, and people are prone to seek explanations for surprising events (Hastie, 1984; Pyszczynski & Greenberg, 1981; Wong & Weiner, 1981). A related reason is that harmful outcomes are unfavorable, and unfavorable outcomes