The causal role of counterfactuals in responsibility ascriptions to (wilfully) ignorant agents

We present evidence that people rely on counterfactual reasoning when assessing the responsibility of agents who unknowingly produce negative consequences. We show that people spontaneously produce different counterfactuals to identify the various reasons agents might have for remaining ignorant and to determine responsibility, and that this thought process is sensitive to manipulation of salience. We explore the relationship between counterfactual salience and responsibility ascription in three experiments. In Experiment 1, we asked people to spontaneously produce counterfactual alternatives to a vignette they read. We manipulated whether agents who produced harm knew the relevant information beforehand and what the reasons for the possible ignorance were. The epistemic condition participants were presented with influenced the type of counterfactual thoughts they spontaneously produced, which in turn influenced their responsibility rating. Experiments 2 and 3 investigate the causal connection between counterfactual types and responsibility ascription. In particular, we show that guiding people to consider alternative perpetrators' actions leads to a greater tendency to ascribe responsibility than guiding them to consider the victim's actions. On the other hand, guiding people to consider the effect of external factors does not seem to affect people’s judgments of the perpetrator’s responsibility. Together, our results indicate that considering an agent’s alternative epistemic action and its counterfactual consequences has a causal effect on responsibility ascription.