Forgetting and blame: When cognitive lapses excuse and when they backfire.

Forgetting is often cited to explain or excuse failures to meet obligations and duties. But does it actually reduce blame? Across seven preregistered experiments (total N = 6,181), we test when and why forgetting mitigates or exacerbates blame. We find that under ordinary circumstances, appeals to forgetting backfire: Individuals who attribute failures to forgetting are judged as more blameworthy than they are otherwise. People tend to believe that failures attributed to forgetting could have and should have been prevented, and these preventability judgments mediate the effect of forgetting on heightened blame judgments. These heightened blame attributions, in turn, have consequences for compensatory justice, highlighting broader consequences. However, forgetting reduces blame when failures appear less preventable, specifically when individuals exert effort to remember or suffer from cognitive impairments that make remembering more difficult. These findings refine moral psychological theories of blame by showing how judgments of preventability mediate the moral status of cognitive lapses, with broad implications for law, policy, and organizational behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Duke Scholars

Author Walter Sinnott-Armstrong Philosophy