An interaction effect of norm violations on causal judgment

Maureen Gill*, Jonathan F. Kominsky, Thomas F. Icard, Joshua Knobe

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

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.

Original languageEnglish
Article number105183
JournalCognition
Volume228
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 2022
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Causal reasoning
  • Causal selection
  • Computational models
  • Counterfactuals
  • Morality

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