Causal superseding

Jonathan F. Kominsky*, Jonathan Phillips, Tobias Gerstenberg, David Lagnado, Joshua Knobe

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)196-209
Number of pages14
JournalCognition
Volume137
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Apr 2015
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Causal reasoning
  • Counterfactuals
  • Morality
  • Superseding

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