Frontiers in Psychology 11:1069 (2020)
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Abstract |
How do people judge the degree of causal responsibility that an agent has for the outcomes of her actions? We show that a relatively unexplored factor -- the robustness of the causal chain linking the agent’s action and the outcome -- influences judgments of causal responsibility of the agent. In three experiments, we vary robustness by manipulating the number of background circumstances under which the action causes the effect, and find that causal responsibility judgments increase with robustness. In the first experiment, the robustness manipulation also raises the probability of the effect given the action. Experiments 2 and 3 control for probability-raising, and show that robustness still affects judgments of causal responsibility. In particular, Experiment 3 introduces an Ellsberg type of scenario to manipulate robustness, while keeping the conditional probability and the skill deployed in the action fixed. Experiment 4, replicates the results of Experiment 3, while contrasting between judgments of causal strength and of causal responsibility. The results show that in all cases, the perceived degree of responsibility increases with the robustness of the action-outcome causal chain.
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Keywords | Causation |
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DOI | 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01069 |
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References found in this work BETA
Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation.James Woodward - 2003 - Oxford University Press.
Nature's Capacities and Their Measurement.Nancy Cartwright - 1989 - Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
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Citations of this work BETA
Causation, Responsibility, and Typicality.Justin Sytsma - 2021 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 12 (4):699-719.
Confidence and Gradation in Causal Judgment.Kevin O'Neill, Paul Henne, Paul Bello, John Pearson & Felipe De Brigard - 2022 - Cognition 223:105036.
A Counterfactual Simulation Model of Causation by Omission.Tobias Gerstenberg & Simon Stephan - 2021 - Cognition 216:104842.
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