An employee receives significantly more praise if his actions result in positive consequences than his superior. An experiment conducted by a team of researchers from Bochum and Cologne has demonstrated that, unlike previously assumed, the acting person’s social status plays an important role when it comes to the distribution of praise and blame – rather than the extent to which an individual has influenced a given situation. The findings are described by philosophy scholars Prof Dr Albert Newen and Pascale Willemsen from Ruhr-Universität Bochum together with Prof Dr Dr Kai Kaspar from the University of Cologne in the journal Philosophical Psychology.