Agentive Wording Shifts Blame Judgments

How an event is described linguistically changes people's moral and legal judgments even when the observed scene is identical: describing a fire as 'she knocked over the candle and she started a fire' (agentive) versus 'the candle toppled and a fire started' (non-agentive) leads people to assign different fine amounts, and languages like Japanese that favor non-agentive framings correlate with judgments of lower responsibility.