Bell‐Ringer Legitimacy and Crisis Responsibility Attribution: A Source‐Based Mechanism of Stakeholder Judgement

ABSTRACT Corporate crises are increasingly triggered by external actors who publicly expose organizational wrongdoing, yet existing crisis communication research has largely overlooked how stakeholders evaluate these accusers. Addressing this gap, this study conceptualizes bell‐ringer legitimacy as a key perceptual mechanism through which audiences interpret externally initiated crises. Specifically, bell‐ringer legitimacy captures whether stakeholders perceive the accuser as socially entitled to make the accusation. Drawing on the attribution theory and the heuristic‐systematic model, this study argues that perceived legitimacy is an intervening variable in the association between source credibility and responsibility judgements, and that this process depends on two audience characteristics: how much people enjoy effortful thinking (need for cognition) and how personally threatened they feel by the crisis (perceived vulnerability). An online survey of 1239 Chinese consumers presented with scenarios based on real food‐safety crises yielded results consistent with both predictions. Perceived legitimacy statistically accounts for the positive indirect association between credibility and blame attribution. Its association with attribution is greatest when people neither favour deep deliberation nor feel personally at risk; under high perceived vulnerability, attribution levels converge across thinking styles, a pattern consistent with a self‐protective blaming response that may attenuate individual differences in reflective thinking. This study identifies a theoretically novel, accuser‐centred mechanism of crisis attribution that existing crisis communication frameworks have not captured.