Rage and reason: the psychology of the intuitive prosecutor

This study explores the conditions under which experimentally primed anger influences both attributions of responsibility and the processes by which p eople make such attributions. Drawing on social functional theory, it was h ypothesized that people are best thought of as 'intuitive prosecutors' who lower their thresholds for making attributions of harmful intent and recomm ending harsh punishment when they both witness a serious transgression of s ocietal norms and believe that the transgressor escaped punishment. The dat a support the hypotheses. Anger primed by a serious crime 'carried over' to influence judgments of unrelated acts of harm only wizen the perpetrator o f the crime went unpunished, notwithstanding the arousal of equally intense anger in conditions in which the perpetrator appropriately punished or his fate was unknown. Participants in the perpetrator-unpunished condition als o relied on simpler and more punitive attributional heuristics for inferrin g responsibility for harm. (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.