Causal superseding
Cognition 137:196-209 (2015)
Abstract
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.
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Archival date: 2016-03-23
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2015-03-17
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2015-03-17
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443 ( #12,458 of 58,441 )
Recent downloads (6 months)
41 ( #19,296 of 58,441 )
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