Abstract
This study conducted a social survey （web survey） on poverty and responsibility to examine the effectiveness of “a critique of the personal responsibility view” in addressing poverty issues. The concept of responsibility was divided into “responsibility as causal attribution” and “responsibility as an undertaking problem-solving,” and the relationship between these two concepts was analyzed. The former responsibility consciousness was indicated by two factors identified through factor analysis : individual causal consciousness and social causal consciousness. The latter responsibility consciousness was indexed through questions asking about support or opposition to poverty countermeasures and was termed “social response consciousness.” An experimental manipulation was conducted on half of the survey respondents to make them aware of the tax burden associated with implementing poverty countermeasures. The analysis revealed two main findings. First, individual causal consciousness had a negative effect on social response consciousness, while social causal consciousness had a positive effect. Second, when tax burden was emphasized, the influence of social causal consciousness on social response consciousness disappeared. Based on these findings, we pointed out that the effectiveness of the “criticism of self-responsibility theory” strategy is conditional.
