Causal Supersession

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

Research output: Contribution to Book/Report typesConference contributionpeer-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 study, we suggest that norm violations also reduce the causality of other agents, a novel phenomenon we refer to as “causal supersession.” We propose and test a counterfactual reasoning model of this phenomenon in three experiments. Experiment 1 shows that causal judgments of one actor are reduced when another actor violates moral norms, even when the outcome in question is neutral. Experiment 2 shows that this causal supersession effect is dependent on a particular event structure, following a prediction of our counterfactual model. Experiment 3 demonstrates that causal supersession can occur with violation of non-moral norms.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014
PublisherThe Cognitive Science Society
Pages761-766
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9780991196708
StatePublished - 2014
Externally publishedYes
Event36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014 - Quebec City, Canada
Duration: 23 Jul 201426 Jul 2014

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014

Conference

Conference36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityQuebec City
Period23/07/1426/07/14

Keywords

  • Causal reasoning
  • Counterfactuals
  • Morality
  • Supersession

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