Social representations on responsibility

Responsibility is today considered a key-concept of the XX century. The psychological literature however has not clearly defined the term, even if attribution theory has dealt with some aspects. This paper examines the social representations of responsibility in a sample of 336 university students in Bologna who were each assigned a free association task using the word-stimulus “responsibility”. The projection of the words on a factorial plan threw up two contrasts: “costs vs. benefits relating to responsible behaviour” and “responsibility towards others vs. individual responsibility”. By way of cluster analysis we then identified three types of representations: one relational, one normative and one personal.