The Decision to Blow the Whistle: A Social Information Processing Framework

This article integrates the power, justice, and prosocial literature on whistleblowing with the attribution and emotion literature to develop a social information processing model. This model illustrates how individuals' attributions and responsibility judgments for wrongdoing, as well as their cost-benefit analyses of acting, influence their emotions and decisions to blow the whistle. In addition, this paper demonstrates how wrongdoers can use impression management tactics to manipulate whistle-blowing decisions. The paper makes a unique contribution by showing how attributions for wrongdoing acts form judgments of responsibility that influence whistle-blowing decisions.