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 language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 196-209 |
Number of pages | 14 |
Journal | Cognition |
Volume | 137 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 1 Apr 2015 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Causal reasoning
- Counterfactuals
- Morality
- Superseding