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When we assign blame for something bad that happened, we are doing something social—we are identifying another human being who caused harm without justification or excuse. A window broken by a hurricane elicits a story about cause, but not a story about blame; a window broken by a person elicit blame attribution. Once a human agent is identified, we naturally turn ou attention to blame severity, a complex judgment shaped by several different concerns. A window broken by a child's stray baseball is assessed differently from a window broken by a vandal, or by a burglar, or by a white supremacis Assessing blame involves not only determining the badness of the harm (for example, property damage versus injured person), but also the badness of the actor's mental state (for example, accident versus intentional), and perhap even the badness of the actor's motive (for example, general destructiveness versus …