People have a remarkable ability to infer the hidden causes of things. From physical evidence, such as muddy foot prints on the floor, we can figure out what happened and who did it. Here, we investigate another source of evidence: social …
People attribute purposes in both mundane and profound ways—such as when thinking about the purpose of a knife and the purpose of a life. In three studies (total N = 13,720 observations from N = 3,430 participants), we tested whether these seemingly …
How do people make causal judgments and assign responsibility? In this paper, I show that counterfactual simulations are key. To simulate counterfactuals, we need three ingredients: a generative mental model of the world, the ability to perform …
In a rapidly changing and diverse world, the ability to reason about conflicting perspectives is critical for effective communication, collaboration, and critical thinking. The current pre-registered experiments with children ages 7 to 11 years …
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 …
How critical are individual members perceived to be for their group's performance? In this paper, we show that judgments of criticality are intimately linked to considering responsibility. Prospective responsibility attributions in groups are …
From building towers to picking an orange from a stack of fruit, assessing support is critical for successfully interacting with the physical world. But how do people determine whether one object supports another? In this paper, we develop the …
Research on causal learning has largely focused on learning and reasoning about contingency data aggregated across discrete observations or experiments. However, this setting represents only the tip of the causal cognition iceberg. A more general …
How do people make causal judgments? In this paper, I show that counterfactual simulations are necessary for explaining causal judgments about events, and that hypotheticals don't suffice. In two experiments, participants viewed video clips of …
What do we communicate with causal explanations? Upon being told, 'E because C', a person might learn that C and E both occurred, and perhaps that there is a causal relationship between C and E. In fact, causal explanations systematically disclose …