1
|
Sytsma J, Willemsen P, Reuter K. Mutual entailment between causation and responsibility. PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES 2023; 180:3593-3614. [PMID: 38046448 PMCID: PMC10687163 DOI: 10.1007/s11098-023-02041-2] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Accepted: 08/29/2023] [Indexed: 12/05/2023]
Abstract
The standard view in philosophy is that responsibility entails causation. Most philosophers treat this entailment claim as an evident insight into the ordinary concepts of responsibility and causation. Further, it is taken to be equally obvious that the reversal of this claim does not hold: causation does not entail responsibility. In contrast, Sytsma and Livengood have put forward an account of the use of ordinary causal attributions (statements like "X caused Y") that contends that they are typically used interchangeably with responsibility attributions (statements like "X is responsible for Y"). Put in terms of the concepts at play in these attributions, this account suggests that the reversal of the entailment claim may also hold, and, a fortiori, there would be mutual entailment between the ordinary concepts of responsibility and causation. Using the cancellability test, we report the results of three pre-registered studies providing empirical evidence that causation and responsibility are mutually entailed by each other.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Justin Sytsma
- Philosophy Programme, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, 5036 Aotearoa New Zealand
| | - Pascale Willemsen
- Department of Philosophy, University of Zurich, 8044 Zurich, Switzerland
| | - Kevin Reuter
- Department of Philosophy, University of Zurich, 8044 Zurich, Switzerland
| |
Collapse
|
2
|
Kirfel L, Phillips J. The pervasive impact of ignorance. Cognition 2023; 231:105316. [PMID: 36402085 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105316] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/17/2022] [Revised: 10/01/2022] [Accepted: 10/23/2022] [Indexed: 11/18/2022]
Abstract
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.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Lara Kirfel
- Department of Psychology, Stanford University, 450 Jane Stanford Way, Building 420, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
| | - Jonathan Phillips
- Cognitive Science Program, Dartmouth College, Winfred-Raven House, 5 Maynard Street, Hanover, NH, 03755 USA
| |
Collapse
|
3
|
Gill M, Kominsky JF, Icard TF, Knobe J. An interaction effect of norm violations on causal judgment. Cognition 2022; 228:105183. [PMID: 35830782 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105183] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/11/2021] [Revised: 04/17/2022] [Accepted: 05/26/2022] [Indexed: 11/19/2022]
Abstract
Existing research has shown that norm violations influence causal judg- ments, and a number of different models have been developed to explain these effects. One such model, the necessity/sufficiency model, predicts an interac- tion pattern in people's judgments. Specifically, it predicts that when people are judging the degree to which a particular factor is a cause, there should be an interaction between (a) the degree to which that factor violates a norm and (b) the degree to which another factor in the situation violates norms. A study of moral norms (N=1000) and norms of proper functioning (N=3000) revealed robust evidence for the predicted interaction effect. The implications of these patterns for existing theories of causal judgments is discussed.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Maureen Gill
- Department of Psychology, Yale University, Box 208205, New Haven, CT 06520-8205, United States.
| | | | | | - Joshua Knobe
- Department of Psychology, Yale University, Box 208205, New Haven, CT 06520-8205, United States
| |
Collapse
|
4
|
Preschoolers learn new moral and conventional norms from direct experiences. J Exp Child Psychol 2021; 215:105322. [PMID: 34871790 DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2021.105322] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/21/2021] [Revised: 09/21/2021] [Accepted: 11/03/2021] [Indexed: 11/21/2022]
Abstract
By observing others, children can learn about different types of norms, including moral norms rooted in concerns for welfare and rights, and social conventions based on directives from authority figures or social consensus. Two experiments examined how preschoolers and adults constructed and applied knowledge about novel moral and conventional norms from their direct social experiences. Participants watched a video of a novel prohibited action that caused pain to a victim (moral conditions) or a sound from a box (conventional conditions). Next, they saw a transgressor puppet, who had either watched the video alongside participants or not, engage in the prohibited action. Preschoolers and adults rapidly constructed distinct moral and conventional evaluations about the novel actions. These distinctions were evident across several response modalities that have often been studied separately, including judgments, reasoning, and actions. However, children did not reliably track the puppet's knowledge of the novel norms. These studies provide experimental support for the idea that children and adults construct distinct moral and conventional norms from social experiences, which in turn guide judgments, reasoning, and behavior.
Collapse
|
5
|
Sytsma J, Livengood J. Causal attributions and the trolley problem. PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY 2021. [DOI: 10.1080/09515089.2021.1945568] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Submit a Manuscript] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/21/2022]
Affiliation(s)
- Justin Sytsma
- Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
| | | |
Collapse
|
6
|
Kirfel L, Lagnado D. Causal judgments about atypical actions are influenced by agents' epistemic states. Cognition 2021; 212:104721. [PMID: 33930783 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104721] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/07/2020] [Revised: 04/02/2021] [Accepted: 04/03/2021] [Indexed: 01/22/2023]
Abstract
A prominent finding in causal cognition research is people's tendency to attribute increased causality to atypical actions. If two agents jointly cause an outcome (conjunctive causation), but differ in how frequently they have performed the causal action before, people judge the atypically acting agent to have caused the outcome to a greater extent. In this paper, we argue that it is the epistemic state of an abnormally acting agent, rather than the abnormality of their action, that is driving people's causal judgments. Given the predictability of the normally acting agent's behaviour, the abnormal agent is in a better position to foresee the consequences of their action. We put this hypothesis to test in four experiments. In Experiment 1, we show that people judge the atypical agent as more causal than the normally acting agent, but also judge the atypical agent to have an epistemic advantage. In Experiment 2, we find that people do not judge a causal difference if no epistemic advantage for the abnormal agent arises. In Experiment 3, we replicate these findings in a scenario in which the abnormal agent's epistemic advantage generalises to a novel context. In Experiment 4, we extend these findings to mental states more broadly construed and develop a Bayesian network model that predicts the degree of outcome-oriented mental states based on action normality and epistemic states. We find that people infer mental states like desire and intention to a greater extent from abnormal behaviour when this behaviour is accompanied by an epistemic advantage. We discuss these results in light of current theories and research on people's preference for abnormal causes.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Lara Kirfel
- Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, United Kingdom.
| | - David Lagnado
- Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, United Kingdom
| |
Collapse
|
7
|
Henne P, Kulesza A, Perez K, Houcek A. Counterfactual thinking and recency effects in causal judgment. Cognition 2021; 212:104708. [PMID: 33819848 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104708] [Citation(s) in RCA: 6] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/15/2020] [Revised: 03/03/2021] [Accepted: 03/26/2021] [Indexed: 11/19/2022]
Abstract
People tend to judge more recent events, relative to earlier ones, as the cause of some particular outcome. For instance, people are more inclined to judge that the last basket, rather than the first, caused the team to win the basketball game. This recency effect, however, reverses in cases of overdetermination: people judge that earlier events, rather than more recent ones, caused the outcome when the event is individually sufficient but not individually necessary for the outcome. In five experiments (N = 5507), we find evidence for the recency effect and the primacy effect for causal judgment. Traditionally, these effects have been a problem for counterfactual views of causal judgment. However, we argue that an extension of a recent counterfactual model of causal judgment explains both the recency and the primacy effect. In line with the predictions of our extended counterfactual model, we also find that, regardless of causal structure, people tend to imagine the counterfactual alternative to the more recent event rather than to the earlier one. Moreover, manipulating this tendency affects causal judgments in the ways predicted by this extended model: asking participants to imagine the counterfactual alternative to the earlier event weakens the interaction between recency and causal structure, and asking participants to imagine the counterfactual alternative to the more recent event strengthens the interaction between recency and causal structure. We discuss these results in relation to work on counterfactual thinking, causal modeling, and late-preemption.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Paul Henne
- Department of Philosophy, Neuroscience Program at Lake Forest College, USA.
| | | | | | | |
Collapse
|
8
|
Kominsky JF, Phillips J. Immoral Professors and Malfunctioning Tools: Counterfactual Relevance Accounts Explain the Effect of Norm Violations on Causal Selection. Cogn Sci 2020; 43:e12792. [PMID: 31742757 DOI: 10.1111/cogs.12792] [Citation(s) in RCA: 18] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/19/2018] [Revised: 09/05/2019] [Accepted: 09/05/2019] [Indexed: 12/01/2022]
Abstract
Causal judgments are widely known to be sensitive to violations of both prescriptive norms (e.g., immoral events) and statistical norms (e.g., improbable events). There is ongoing discussion as to whether both effects are best explained in a unified way through changes in the relevance of counterfactual possibilities, or whether these two effects arise from unrelated cognitive mechanisms. Recent work has shown that moral norm violations affect causal judgments of agents, but not inanimate artifacts used by those agents. These results have been interpreted as showing that prescriptive norm violations only affect causal reasoning about intentional agents, but not the use of inanimate artifacts, thereby providing evidence that the effect of prescriptive norm violations arises from mechanisms specific to reasoning about intentional agents, and thus casting doubt on a unified counterfactual analysis of causal reasoning. Four experiments explore this recent finding and provide clear support for a unified counterfactual analysis. Experiment 1 demonstrates that these newly observed patterns in causal judgments are closely mirrored by judgments of counterfactual relevance. Experiment 2 shows that the relationship between causal and counterfactual judgments is moderated by causal structure, as uniquely predicted by counterfactual accounts. Experiment 3 directly manipulates the relevance of counterfactual alternatives and finds that causal judgments of intentional agents and inanimate artifacts are similarly affected. Finally, Experiment 4 shows that prescriptive norm violations (in which artifacts malfunction) affect causal judgments of inanimate artifacts in much the same way that prescriptive norm violations (in which agents act immorally) affect causal judgments of intentional agents.
Collapse
|
9
|
Phillips J, Morris A, Cushman F. How We Know What Not To Think. Trends Cogn Sci 2019; 23:1026-1040. [PMID: 31676214 DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2019.09.007] [Citation(s) in RCA: 44] [Impact Index Per Article: 8.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/20/2018] [Revised: 09/09/2019] [Accepted: 09/10/2019] [Indexed: 11/16/2022]
Abstract
Humans often represent and reason about unrealized possible actions - the vast infinity of things that were not (or have not yet been) chosen. This capacity is central to the most impressive of human abilities: causal reasoning, planning, linguistic communication, moral judgment, etc. Nevertheless, how do we select possible actions that are worth considering from the infinity of unrealized actions that are better left ignored? We review research across the cognitive sciences, and find that the possible actions considered by default are those that are both likely to occur and generally valuable. We then offer a unified theory of why. We propose that (i) across diverse cognitive tasks, the possible actions we consider are biased towards those of general practical utility, and (ii) a plausible primary function for this mechanism resides in decision making.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Jonathan Phillips
- Program in Cognitive Science, Dartmouth College, 201 Reed Hall, Hanover, NH 03755, USA.
| | - Adam Morris
- Department of Psychology, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
| | - Fiery Cushman
- Department of Psychology, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
| |
Collapse
|
10
|
|
11
|
Proft M, Rakoczy H. The ontogeny of intent-based normative judgments. Dev Sci 2018; 22:e12728. [PMID: 30276934 DOI: 10.1111/desc.12728] [Citation(s) in RCA: 7] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.2] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/04/2017] [Revised: 06/18/2018] [Accepted: 07/26/2018] [Indexed: 11/30/2022]
Abstract
When evaluating norm transgressions, children begin to show some sensitivity to the agent's intentionality around preschool age. However, the specific developmental trajectories of different forms of such intent-based judgments and their cognitive underpinnings are still largely unclear. The current studies, therefore, systematically investigated the development of intent-based normative judgments as a function of two crucial factors: (a) the type of the agent's mental state underlying a normative transgression, and (b) the type of norm transgressed (moral versus conventional). In Study 1, 5- and 7-year-old children as well as adults were presented with vignettes in which an agent transgressed either a moral or a conventional norm. Crucially, she did so either intentionally, accidentally (not intentionally at all) or unknowingly (intentionally, yet based on a false belief regarding the outcome). The results revealed two asymmetries in children's intent-based judgments. First, all age groups showed greater sensitivity to mental state information for moral compared to conventional transgressions. Second, children's (but not adults') normative judgments were more sensitive to the agent's intention than to her belief. Two subsequent studies investigated this asymmetry in children more closely and found evidence that it is based on performance factors: children are able in principle to take into account an agent's false belief in much the same way as her intentions, yet do not make belief-based judgments in many existing tasks (like that of Study 1) due to their inferential complexity. Taken together, these findings contribute to a more systematic understanding of the development of intent-based normative judgment.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Marina Proft
- Department of Developmental Psychology, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany
| | - Hannes Rakoczy
- Department of Developmental Psychology, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany
| |
Collapse
|
12
|
Roberts SO, Guo C, Ho AK, Gelman SA. Children’s descriptive-to-prescriptive tendency replicates (and varies) cross-culturally: Evidence from China. J Exp Child Psychol 2018; 165:148-160. [DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2017.03.018] [Citation(s) in RCA: 20] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/14/2016] [Revised: 03/21/2017] [Accepted: 03/24/2017] [Indexed: 10/19/2022]
|
13
|
Icard TF, Kominsky JF, Knobe J. Normality and actual causal strength. Cognition 2017; 161:80-93. [DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2017.01.010] [Citation(s) in RCA: 33] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/01/2016] [Revised: 01/04/2017] [Accepted: 01/09/2017] [Indexed: 10/20/2022]
|
14
|
Samland J, Waldmann MR. How prescriptive norms influence causal inferences. Cognition 2016; 156:164-176. [DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2016.07.007] [Citation(s) in RCA: 19] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.4] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/10/2015] [Revised: 07/13/2016] [Accepted: 07/14/2016] [Indexed: 10/21/2022]
|