Abstract

ABSTRACTAccording to difference-based models of causal judgement, the epistemic state of the agent should not affect judgements of cause. Four experiments examined opportunity chains in which a physical event enabled a subsequent proximal cause to produce an outcome. All four experiments showed that when the proximal cause was a human action, it was judged as more causal if the agent was aware of his opportunity than if he was not or if the proximal cause was a physical event. The first two experiments showed that these preferences could not be explained in terms of differences in perceived conditional probability, social controllability or perceptions of the causal sequence as forming a single unit. The third experiment showed that awareness affected the perceived deliberateness with which the action brought the outcome about but not its perceived voluntariness. The fourth experiment showed that...