Is the victim-perpetrator asymmetry stronger in situations where blame is being assigned?

Aggressive behaviors occur when one person, a perpetrator, intentionally harms another person, a victim (e.g., Parrott and Giancola, 2007). When reporting their judgments, victims often report aggressive behaviors as being more harmful than perpetrators do—a so-called victim-perpetrator asymmetry. This asymmetry is well-established (Baumeister et al., 1990; Elshout et al., 2017; Ent and Parton, 2019; McCarthy and Rivers, 2021); however, there is scant experimental tests of the conditions under which the effect is especially strong. In that vein, the current Registered Report examined whether the victim-perpetrator asymmetry is stronger in conditions when people feel they will be evaluated for blameworthiness. In our first study, participants read a vignette describing an aggressive interaction and were assigned to adopt the perspective of either the victim or the perpetrator. In our second study, participants either recalled an instance when they intentionally harmed another person or an instance when they were harmed by another person. Further, in both studies, half the participants were told we were interested in determining who was more to blame in the situation and half received no such instructions. All participants then rated the harmfulness of the aggressive behavior. The victim-perpetrator asymmetry was unchanged by our blameworthiness manipulations in both studies. These results did not support our hypothesis that telling people they will be evaluated for blame will increase victims' and perpetrators' judgments of aggressive behaviors.