Causal Responsibility and Robust Causation

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Guy Grinfeld¹  David Lagnado²  Tobias Gerstenberg³  James F. Woodward⁴  Marius Usher¹ 

[1] School of Psychology, Tel Aviv University;and Brain Sciences Department, University College London, United Kingdom;Stanford University, United States;Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, United States;Sagol School of Neuroscience, Tel Aviv University

关键词: causality and responsibility;    attributions of responsibility;    robust causation;    causal contingency and stability;    epistemic perspective;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01069

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

How do people judge the degree of causal responsibility that an agent has for the outcomes of her actions? We show that a relatively unexplored factor – the robustness (or stability) of the causal chain linking the agent’s action and the outcome – influences judgments of causal responsibility of the agent. In three experiments, we vary robustness by manipulating the number of background circumstances under which the action causes the effect, and find that causal responsibility judgments increase with robustness. In the first experiment, the robustness manipulation also raises the probability of the effect given the action. Experiments 2 and 3 control for probability-raising, and show that robustness still affects judgments of causal responsibility. In particular, Experiment 3 introduces an Ellsberg type of scenario to manipulate robustness, while keeping the conditional probability and the skill deployed in the action fixed. Experiment 4, replicates the results of Experiment 3, while contrasting between judgments of causal strength and of causal responsibility. The results show that in all cases, the perceived degree of responsibility (but not of causal strength) increases with the robustness of the action-outcome causal chain.

【 授权许可】

CC BY