Causal judgments about atypical actions are influenced by agents' epistemic states

Causation, Norms, and Cognitive Bias

Extant research has shown that ordinary causal judgements are sensitive to normative factors. For instance, agents who violate a norm are standardly deemed more causal than norm-conforming agents in identical situations. In this paper, we present novel findings that go against predictions made by several competing accounts that aim to explain this so-called "Norm Effect". By aid of a series of five preregistered experiments (N = 2'688), we show that participants deem agents who violate nonpertinent or silly norms - norms that do not relate to the outcome at hand, or for which there is little independent justification - as more causal. Furthermore, this curious effect cannot be explained by aid of potential mediators such as foreknowledge, desire or foreseeability of harm. The "Silly Norm Effect", we argue, spells trouble for several views of folk causality in the literature, and lends support to a Bias View, according to which Norm Effects are the result of blame-driven bias. We close with a discussion of the relevance of these findings for the just assessment of causation in the law.

How barriers become invisible: Children are less sensitive to constraints that are stable over time

When making inferences about the mental lives of others (e.g., others' preferences), it is critical to consider the extent to which the choices we observe are constrained. Prior research on the development of this tendency indicates a contradictory pattern: Children show remarkable sensitivity to constraints in traditional experimental paradigms, yet often fail to consider real-world constraints and privilege inherent causes instead. We propose that one explanation for this discrepancy may be that real-world constraints are often stable over time and lose their salience. The present research tested whether children (N = 133, 5- to 12-year-old mostly US children; 55% female, 45% male) become less sensitive to an actor's constraints after first observing two constrained actors (Stable condition) versus after first observing two actors in contexts with greater choice (Not Stable condition). We crossed the stability of the constraint with the type of constraint: either the constraint was deterministic such that there was only one option available (No Other Option constraint) or, in line with many real-world constraints, the constraint was probabilistic such that there was another option, but it was difficult to access (Hard to Access constraint). Results indicated that children in the Stable condition became less sensitive to the probabilistic Hard to Access constraint across trials. Notably, we also found that children's sensitivity to constraints was enhanced in the Not Stable condition regardless of whether the constraint was probabilistic or deterministic. We discuss implications for children's sensitivity to real-world constraints. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: This research addresses the apparent contradiction that children are sensitive to constraints in experimental paradigms but are often insensitive to constraints in the real world. One explanation for this discrepancy is that constraints in the real world tend to be stable over time and may lose their salience. When probabilistic constraints (i.e., when a second option is available but hard to access) are stable, children become de-sensitized to constraints across trials. First observing contexts with greater choice increases children's sensitivity to both probabilistic and deterministic constraints.

The importance of epistemic intentions in ascription of responsibility

We investigate how people ascribe responsibility to an agent who caused a bad outcome but did not know he would. The psychological processes for making such judgments, we argue, involve finding a counterfactual in which some minimally benevolent intention initiates a course of events that leads to a better outcome than the actual one. We hypothesize that such counterfactuals can include, when relevant, epistemic intentions. With four vignette studies, we show that people consider epistemic intentions when ascribing responsibility for a bad outcome. We further investigate which epistemic intentions people are likely to consider when building counterfactuals for responsibility ascription. We find that, when an agent did not predict a bad outcome, people ascribe responsibility depending on the reasons behind the agents' lack of knowledge. People judge agents responsible for the bad outcome they caused when they could have easily predicted the consequences of their actions but did not care to acquire the relevant information. However, when this information was hard to acquire, people are less likely to judge them responsible.

If not me, then who? Responsibility and replacement

How do people hold others responsible? Responsibility judgments are affected not only by what actually happened, but also by what could have happened if things had turned out differently. Here, we look at how replaceability - the ease with which a person could have been replaced by someone else - affects responsibility. We develop the counterfactual replacement model, which runs simulations of alternative scenarios to determine the probability that the outcome would have differed if the person of interest had been replaced. The model predicts that a person is held more responsible, the more difficult it would have been to replace them. To test the model's predictions, we design a paradigm that quantitatively varies replaceability by manipulating the number of replacements and the probability with which each replacement would have been available. Across three experiments featuring increasingly complex scenarios, we show that the model explains participants' responsibility judgments well in both social and physical settings, and better than alternative models that rely only on features of what actually happened.

The pervasive impact of ignorance

Norm violations have been demonstrated to impact a wide range of seemingly non-normative judgments. Among other things, when agents' actions violate prescriptive norms they tend to be seen as having done those actions more freely, as having acted more intentionally, as being more of a cause of subsequent outcomes, and even as being less happy. The explanation of this effect continue to be debated, with some researchers appealing to features of actions that violate norms, and other researcher emphasizing the importance of agents' mental states when acting. Here, we report the results of two large-scale experiments that replicate and extend twelve of the studies that originally demonstrated the pervasive impact of norm violations. In each case, we build on the pre-existing experimental paradigms to additionally manipulate whether the agents knew that they were violating a norm while holding fixed the action done. We find evidence for a pervasive impact of ignorance: the impact of norm violations on non-normative judgments depends largely on the agent knowing that they were violating a norm when acting. Moreover, we find evidence that the reduction in the impact of normality is underpinned by people's counterfactual reasoning: people are less likely to consider an alternative to the agent's action if the agent is ignorant. We situate our findings in the wider debate around the role or normality in people's reasoning.