Ascription of Responsibility Questionnaire (ARQ)

Abstract

The Ascription of Responsibility Questionnaire (ARQ) is a multidimensional psychometric instrument developed by Peter Suedfeld, A. Ralph Hakstian, E. Jane Ballard, and D. S. Rank (1985, 1986) to assess individual differences in how people allocate moral, social, and personal responsibility. While earlier instruments—most notably Shalom Schwartz’s unidimensional Ascription of Responsibility (AR) Scale within the Norm Activation Model—treated responsibility attribution as a singular, bipolar construct, empirical advances demonstrated that individuals ascribe responsibility across distinct contextual and conceptual spheres. The ARQ operationalizes this construct across 40 self-report items evaluated on a 7-point Likert response scale ranging from 1 (Disagree strongly) to 7 (Agree strongly). Psychometric evaluations identify four primary subscales: Traditional Focused Responsibility, Diffuse Responsibility, Exercised Responsibility, and Individual Focused Responsibility. Factor-analytic investigations have confirmed that these dimensions capture distinct structural domains: fidelity to parental, institutional, and divine authority (Traditional Focused); systemic and collective obligation toward social welfare (Diffuse); subjective self-efficacy, proactive agency, and past leadership experience (Exercised); and strict individual accountability, meritocratic justice, and personal causation (Individual Focused). The scale demonstrates robust internal consistency reliability across subscales (α coefficients typically ranging from .70 to .84) and stable test-retest reliability over multiple intervals. Convergent and discriminant validity analyses substantiate the ARQ’s utility in predicting civic behavior, moral judgment, pro-social interventions, policy preferences, and compliance with institutional norms. The instrument remains a critical methodological tool in social, personality, and political psychology, bridging philosophical ethics with empirical behavioral assessment.

Keywords

Ascription of Responsibility Questionnaire, ARQ, Peter Suedfeld, A. Ralph Hakstian, moral attribution, personal agency, internal locus of control, social responsibility, meritocracy, psychometrics.

Authors

The Ascription of Responsibility Questionnaire was formulated and validated through collaborative psychometric research conducted in the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada). The principal contributors include:

• A. Ralph Hakstian, Ph.D.: Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of British Columbia; a distinguished psychometrician specializing in multivariate statistics, factor analysis, test construction, and measurement theory.
• Peter Suedfeld, Ph.D., FRSC: Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of British Columbia; an internationally renowned authority in social psychology, cognitive complexity, political decision-making, polar psychology, and human adaptation under extreme environmental and psychological conditions.
• E. Jane Ballard, Ph.D.: Research associate and psychometric investigator whose research addressed personality structure, moral orientation, and value systems.
• D. S. Rank, M.A.: Psychometric collaborator and co-investigator in the structural development and empirical validation of the ARQ instrumentation.

Purpose

The foundational purpose of the Ascription of Responsibility Questionnaire is to provide an empirically grounded, multidimensional assessment of how individuals perceive, locate, and operationalize the concept of responsibility. For decades, moral and social psychologists struggled with a central paradox: while self-reported moral attitudes often correlated poorly with observable pro-social actions, the variable of ascription of responsibility served as an essential cognitive mediator or moderator. Specifically, individuals who fail to acknowledge personal responsibility for an outcome frequently bypass their internalized moral norms, whereas individuals with high responsibility ascription experience moral obligations as binding behavioral imperatives.

Before the development of the ARQ, researchers predominantly relied on instruments that treated responsibility as a singular bipolar continuum (i.e., external versus internal attribution) or focused narrowly on bystander intervention in immediate emergencies. Hakstian, Suedfeld, and their colleagues recognized that individuals often hold complex, multi-tiered attributional schemas that cannot be captured by a single summary score. For instance, an individual might simultaneously endorse strict personal responsibility for occupational achievements, appeal to systemic or state responsibility for addressing poverty, and defer to divine or traditional parental authority for moral guidance.

The ARQ was systematically constructed to resolve these limitations by serving several distinct theoretical and practical applications:

• Personality and Social Research: It enables investigators to map how different profiles of responsibility attribution correlate with cognitive complexity, dogmatism, authoritarianism, prosocial orientation, and political ideology.
• Organizational and Occupational Psychology: The instrument assesses an individual’s inclination toward personal agency and leadership initiative (Exercised Responsibility) versus bureaucratic dependency, aiding in leadership development and role allocation.
• Clinical and Forensic Psychology: The ARQ provides insight into cognitive distortions regarding accountability, externalization of blame, learned helplessness, and antisocial rationalizations, facilitating the assessment of therapeutic readiness and moral reasoning.
• Public Policy and Sociological Analysis: By evaluating public attitudes toward state assistance versus individual enterprise, the ARQ serves as an empirical instrument for examining ideological polarization regarding welfare, environmental stewardship, and institutional authority.

Psychological Construct

The overarching construct assessed by the ARQ is ascription of responsibility—the cognitive and evaluative tendency to attribute the origin, moral obligation, execution, and consequences of human actions to specific agents, whether the individual self, collective institutions, cultural traditions, or transcendent forces. The ARQ operationalizes this construct across four distinct, correlated dimensions:

1. Traditional Focused Responsibility

This dimension measures an individual’s tendency to anchor moral obligation and behavioral norms within established traditional, familial, and metaphysical structures. Individuals scoring high on Traditional Focused Responsibility emphasize filial piety, respect for parental guidance, adherence to conventional religious practices, and belief in divine or supernatural determination of human fate. Responsibility is perceived not as an autonomous, self-invented construct, but as a set of duties prescribed by overarching spiritual, familial, and cultural orders. Illustrative items include affirmations of deep respect for parents (Item 1), the role of fate or supreme beings (Items 2 and 26), and childhood church attendance (Items 5 and 31).

2. Diffuse Responsibility

Diffuse Responsibility reflects the belief that responsibility for human welfare, social well-being, and macro-level decision-making is broadly distributed across collective entities, state institutions, and international systems. Individuals high in this dimension reject strict, atomistic self-sufficiency and instead advocate for institutional safety nets, collective diplomacy, and shared governance. It encompasses beliefs that the state must guarantee citizen well-being (Item 8), that older adults deserve universal pensions (Item 6), that nations bear mutual obligations to aid struggling countries (Item 27), and that decisions should be reached through collective consensus (Item 34).

3. Exercised Responsibility

Exercised Responsibility captures behavioral agency, self-perceived leadership competence, and the historical enactment of responsibility across one’s educational, occupational, and interpersonal life. Unlike purely philosophical attitudes toward justice, this subscale taps an active, pragmatic self-concept defined by taking charge of ambiguous situations, offering direction, and executing organizational duties. High scorers report a preference for leading over following, active involvement in committees or group endeavors, and extensive past experience in positions of formal authority (e.g., Items 3, 9, 16, 20, 24, and 40).

4. Individual Focused Responsibility

Individual Focused Responsibility evaluates adherence to principles of strict personal accountability, meritocracy, retributive justice, and individual causality. This dimension reflects an ethos wherein every rational human being is deemed entirely responsible for their actions and life outcomes, independent of environmental constraints. High scorers endorse rigorous alignment between effort and reward, punitive consequences for transgressions, and the rejection of societal obligations toward capable adults. Items reflecting this construct affirm that “every sane individual is responsible for his every action” (Item 13), that “society does not owe you a living” (Item 37), and that justice should take precedence over mercy (Item 28).

Theoretical Framework

The ARQ is situated at the intersection of several influential psychological and philosophical frameworks, synthesizing attribution theory, social cognitive models of moral judgment, and personality theories of locus of control.

The Norm Activation Model and Moral Attribution

A primary theoretical precursor to the ARQ is Shalom H. Schwartz’s (1968, 1977) Norm Activation Model (NAM). Schwartz posited that personal moral norms only translate into prosocial or altruistic behavior when two sequential cognitive conditions are met: Awareness of Consequences (AC)—the perception that a given situation presents negative outcomes to others—and Ascription of Responsibility (AR)—the recognition that the self is personally obligated to act to prevent those consequences. If an actor successfully neutralizes responsibility by asserting that external circumstances, other bystanders, or the victims themselves are responsible, moral obligation is defused.

Hakstian and Suedfeld expanded upon Schwartz’s model by arguing that responsibility attribution is not merely a situational defense mechanism or a singular trait, but an organized cognitive matrix. Individuals possess chronic attributional tendencies that shape not only whether they accept responsibility in immediate moral crises, but also how they construct societal justice, institutional roles, and personal self-efficacy.

Locus of Control and Causal Agency

The ARQ intersects with Julian Rotter’s (1966) theory of Internal versus External Locus of Control of Reinforcement and Fritz Heider’s (1958) foundational phenomenological analysis of responsibility levels. Heider outlined five developmental levels of responsibility attribution: association, commission, foreseeability, intentionality, and justificability. While Rotter’s locus of control construct focused broadly on expectancies regarding reinforcement contingencies (whether rewards are contingent upon one’s own actions or external forces like luck and powerful others), the ARQ distinguishes between the *causal* expectation of reinforcement and the *moral* and *operational* obligation to act. Exercised Responsibility maps onto high perceived internal competence, whereas Traditional and Diffuse dimensions represent distinct forms of external structuring—one rooted in normative order and the other in societal interdependence.

Cognitive Complexity and Political Ideology

Peter Suedfeld’s broader scholarship in integrative complexity informs the ARQ’s structural design. Integrative complexity describes the capacity to recognize multiple perspectives or dimensions within a problem (differentiation) and integrate them into coherent conceptual frameworks. By disentangling Individual Focused and Diffuse Responsibility, the ARQ accommodates cognitively complex individuals who recognize systemic socio-economic barriers (high Diffuse) while simultaneously maintaining personal ethical standards of self-determination (high Individual Focused).

Validity

Extensive psychometric investigations reported by Suedfeld et al. (1985) and Hakstian et al. (1986) provide robust empirical evidence supporting the construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity of the ARQ across normative university samples and diverse adult community cohorts.

Construct and Factorial Validity

The construct validity of the ARQ was established through rigorous exploratory and confirmatory factor-analytic frameworks. Initial item pools totaling over 100 statements addressing responsibility attribution across legal, moral, familial, and civic domains were iteratively refined through item-total correlations, factor loadings, and content validity ratings by independent panels of psychological evaluators. The final 40-item structure consistently reproduces the four designated orthogonal/oblique factors, confirming that responsibility attribution is inherently multidimensional.

Convergent Validity

The subscales of the ARQ demonstrate strong, theoretically predicted patterns of convergence with established psychometric scales:

• Traditional Focused Responsibility exhibits moderate to high positive correlations with measures of religious orthodoxy, traditional moral values, and scales measuring conventionalism and authoritarian submission ($r = .48$ to $.62$, $p < .001$).
• Diffuse Responsibility correlates positively with instruments assessing social welfare orientation, egalitarianism, collectivism, and political liberalism ($r = .35$ to $.54$, $p < .001$).
• Exercised Responsibility displays robust convergent associations with measures of generalized self-efficacy, active leadership, assertiveness, and internal locus of control ($r = .40$ to $.58$, $p < .001$).
• Individual Focused Responsibility correlates positively with Protestant Work Ethic scales, internal attributions for poverty, and belief in a just world ($r = .42$ to $.61$, $p < .001$).

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity is supported by minimal overlap with measures of social desirability (e.g., the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale), indicating that ARQ responses reflect genuine cognitive frameworks rather than impression management. Furthermore, the four subscales exhibit low to moderate intercorrelations with one another (inter-factor correlations generally ranging between $|r| = .05$ and $.32$), demonstrating that an individual’s score on one dimension cannot be predicted from their scores on the remaining three dimensions.

Criterion and Predictive Validity

In behavioral and decision-making experiments, the ARQ has successfully predicted real-world moral and civic actions. In studies assessing simulated jury decisions, participants high in Individual Focused Responsibility allocated significantly harsher sentences to criminal defendants, whereas participants high in Diffuse Responsibility were more likely to identify mitigating structural circumstances. In educational settings, students scoring high in Exercised Responsibility demonstrated greater voluntary engagement in collaborative course design and committee governance (Hakstian et al., 1986).

Reliability

The psychometric evaluation of the ARQ demonstrates solid internal consistency reliability and temporal stability across diverse participant samples.

Internal Consistency Reliability

Cronbach’s alpha coefficients reported in the primary validation studies (Suedfeld et al., 1985; Hakstian et al., 1986) reflect robust internal consistency across all four subscales:

• Traditional Focused Responsibility: α coefficients range from .78 to .84 across university and community adult cohorts, reflecting high item homogeneity in measuring deference to traditional, familial, and religious authority.
• Diffuse Responsibility: α coefficients range from .72 to .79, demonstrating acceptable to strong reliability for measuring systemic social responsibility.
• Exercised Responsibility: α coefficients range from .75 to .82, showing consistent item performance in capturing self-reported leadership experience and initiative.
• Individual Focused Responsibility: α coefficients range from .70 to .77, confirming solid structural cohesion regarding meritocratic justice and personal accountability.

Test-Retest Stability

Temporal stability assessments conducted over intervals spanning 4 to 8 weeks yield test-retest reliability coefficients ranging from $r_{tt} = .74$ to $.86$ across subscales. These figures establish that the ARQ measures stable, enduring personality orientations and cognitive attributional dispositions rather than transient mood states or situational responses.

Factor Analysis

The structural composition of the ARQ was established using common factor analysis on broad item sets administered to large validation samples (e.g., $N = 436$ university students and cross-validation cohorts of $N = 506$ community adults). Factor extraction was executed using principal axis factoring followed by both orthogonal (Varimax) and oblique (Promax) rotations to evaluate factor independence.

Factor Extraction and Loadings

The scree plot and eigenvalue examination (Kaiser-Guttman criterion) clearly indicated a distinct four-factor solution accounting for approximately 42% to 48% of the total common variance across administrations:

• Factor 1: Traditional Focused Responsibility: Primary loadings (ranging from .45 to .78) emerge on items addressing church attendance (Items 5, 31, 39), respect and deference toward parents (Items 1, 14, 18), and metaphysical determinism/religious belief (Items 2, 26, 29, 33).
• Factor 2: Diffuse Responsibility: High factor loadings (.40 to .72) cluster around statements regarding institutional obligations for citizen welfare (Item 8), universal pensions (Item 6), mutual international aid (Item 27), disarmament initiatives (Item 15), collective group decision-making (Item 34), and student representation in policy (Item 36).
• Factor 3: Exercised Responsibility: Substantial loadings (.48 to .76) appear on items tapping proactive leadership, taking charge of groups, making suggestions, and historical roles of responsibility (Items 3, 9, 12 [reversed], 16, 20, 24, 40).
• Factor 4: Individual Focused Responsibility: Robust loadings (.38 to .69) characterize items asserting that every individual is responsible for their actions (Item 13), that society does not owe individuals a living (Item 37), that welfare recipients are unmotivated (Item 4), that merit alone should be rewarded (Items 7, 25), and that justice supersedes mercy (Item 28).

Subsequent confirmatory factor analytic (CFA) studies have corroborated the four-factor model, exhibiting acceptable fit indices (Comparative Fit Index [CFI] > .90, Root Mean Square Error of Approximation [RMSEA] < .06) compared to alternative single-factor or two-factor models.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Full Instrument Name: Ascription of Responsibility Questionnaire
• Acronym: ARQ
• Authors: A. Ralph Hakstian, Peter Suedfeld, E. Jane Ballard, and D. S. Rank
• Original Publication Years: 1985, 1986
• Format: 40-item self-report psychometric rating scale
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale (1 = Disagree strongly, 2 = Disagree somewhat, 3 = Disagree slightly, 4 = Neither agree nor disagree, 5 = Agree slightly, 6 = Agree somewhat, 7 = Agree strongly)
• Subscale Composition:
  • Traditional Focused Responsibility (Familial, religious, and spiritual authority)
  • Diffuse Responsibility (State, systemic, collective, and institutional welfare)
  • Exercised Responsibility (Active agency, past and current leadership initiative)
  • Individual Focused Responsibility (Personal causality, meritocracy, and individual accountability)
• Scoring Directions: Subscale scores are obtained by calculating the sum or mean of the items corresponding to each dimension. Negatively phrased items (such as Item 12: “I prefer following rather than leading” within Exercised Responsibility) must be reverse-scored prior to aggregation ($7 – \text{Score} + 1$). High scores reflect stronger adherence to the specified dimension of responsibility.
• Administration Time: Approximately 10 to 15 minutes.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Ascription of Responsibility Questionnaire was first published in 1985 and 1986 within academic peer-reviewed psychology literature. As an academic assessment tool developed under university auspices, the questionnaire is available for non-commercial educational and empirical scientific research without licensing fees, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution is accorded to the original authors (A. Ralph Hakstian, Peter Suedfeld, and colleagues) and the publishing journals. Researchers interested in commercial applications, proprietary software integration, or high-stakes institutional testing should consult the original authors or copyright holders (such as the Journal of Applied Social Psychology and Journal of Personality Assessment) to secure formal permissions.

References

• Hakstian, A. R., Suedfeld, P., Ballard, E. J., & Rank, D. S. (1986). The Ascription of Responsibility Questionnaire: Development and empirical extensions. Journal of Personality Assessment, 50(2), 229–247. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327752jpa5002_8
• Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. John Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1037/10628-000
• Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 80(1), 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0092976
• Schwartz, S. H. (1968). Words, deeds, and the perception of consequences and responsibility in action situations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 10(3), 232–242. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0026569
• Schwartz, S. H. (1977). Normative influences on altruism. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 10, 221–279. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60358-5
• Suedfeld, P., Hakstian, A. R., Rank, D. S., & Ballard, E. J. (1985). Ascription of responsibility as a personality variable. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 15(3), 285–311. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1559-1816.1985.tb00904.x

Items of the Scale