Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
7287279 | Cognition | 2015 | 14 Pages |
Abstract
When agents violate norms, they are typically judged to be more of a cause of resulting outcomes. In this paper, we suggest that norm violations also affect the causality attributed to other agents, a phenomenon we refer to as “causal superseding.” We propose and test a counterfactual reasoning model of this phenomenon in four experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 provide an initial demonstration of the causal superseding effect and distinguish it from previously studied effects. Experiment 3 shows that this causal superseding effect is dependent on a particular event structure, following a prediction of our counterfactual model. Experiment 4 demonstrates that causal superseding can occur with violations of non-moral norms. We propose a model of the superseding effect based on the idea of counterfactual sufficiency.
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Authors
Jonathan F. Kominsky, Jonathan Phillips, Tobias Gerstenberg, David Lagnado, Joshua Knobe,