The timing and order in which a set of events occur strongly influences whether people judge them to be causally related. But what do people think particular temporal patterns of events tell them about causal structure? And how do they integrate …
In order to be held responsible, a person’s action has to have made some sort of difference to the outcome. In this paper, we propose a counterfactual replacement model according to which people attribute responsibility by comparing their prior …
Would Dan have died if Bob hadn’t shot? In this paper, we show that people’s answer depends on whether or not they are asked about what would have caused Bob not to shoot. Something needs to change in order to turn an actual world into a …
There is a long tradition in both philosophy and psychology to separate process accounts from dependency accounts of causation. In this paper, we motivate a unifying account that explains people’s causal attributions in terms of counterfactuals …
How do people make inferences from complex patterns of evidence across diverse situations? What does a computational model need in order to capture the abstract knowledge people use for everyday reasoning? In this paper, we explore a novel modeling …
We consider an approach to blame attribution based on counterfactual reasoning in probabilistic generative models. In this view, people intervene on each variable within their model and assign blame in proportion to how much a change to a variable …
To what extent do people care about the intentions behind an action? What if the intentions can be deceptive? We conducted two experiments to complement previous evidence about the roles of outcomes and intentions in economic games. The results of …
This study investigates the influence of players’ performance and level of skill on responsibility attributions in groups. Participants act as external judges and evaluate the performance of teams of differently skilled players who compete in a darts …
Two experiments establish a rational order effect in responsibility attributions. Experiment 1 shows that in a team challenge in which players contribute sequentially, the last player’s blame or credit for a performance is reduced if the team’s …
How much are people’s responsibility attributions affected by intended versus actual contributions in group contexts? A novel experimental-game paradigm dissociated intended from actual contributions: good intentions could result in bad outcomes and …