An interaction effect of norm violations on causal judgment

Maureen Gill; Jonathan F Kominsky; Thomas F Icard; Joshua Knobe

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105183

An interaction effect of norm violations on causal judgment

Cognition. 2022 Nov:228:105183. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105183. Epub 2022 Jul 10.

Authors

Maureen Gill¹, Jonathan F Kominsky², Thomas F Icard³, Joshua Knobe⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychology, Yale University, Box 208205, New Haven, CT 06520-8205, United States. Electronic address: Maureen.gill@yale.edu.
² Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States.
³ Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States.
⁴ Department of Psychology, Yale University, Box 208205, New Haven, CT 06520-8205, United States.

PMID: 35830782
DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105183

Abstract

Existing research has shown that norm violations influence causal judg- ments, and a number of different models have been developed to explain these effects. One such model, the necessity/sufficiency model, predicts an interac- tion pattern in people's judgments. Specifically, it predicts that when people are judging the degree to which a particular factor is a cause, there should be an interaction between (a) the degree to which that factor violates a norm and (b) the degree to which another factor in the situation violates norms. A study of moral norms (N=1000) and norms of proper functioning (N=3000) revealed robust evidence for the predicted interaction effect. The implications of these patterns for existing theories of causal judgments is discussed.

Keywords: Causal reasoning; Causal selection; Computational models; Counterfactuals; Morality.

MeSH terms

Causality
Humans
Judgment*
Morals*