Assignment of Responsibility and Flood Hazard in Catahoula County, Louisiana

Abstract

This exploratory study tested the proposition that the worse the consequences of a geophysical event, the greater the tendency of observers to assign responsibility for the disaster to some appropriate person. More specifically, the investigation tested the hypothesis that a fictitious official in charge of levee maintenance would be assigned increasing responsibility for a riverine flooding as its severity increased. Results were in line with the hypothesis, but for women only. Subsequent analyses of alternative variables suggested that in men assignment of responsibility is related to the degree to which the subjects were certain that the official had performed his job, rather than to severity of consequences.