A computational model of responsibility judgments from counterfactual simulations and intention inferences

Abstract

How responsible someone is for an outcome depends on what causal role their actions played, and what those actions reveal about their mental states, such as their intentions. In this paper, we develop a computational account of responsibility attribution that integrates these two cognitive processes: causal attribution and mental state inference. Our model makes use of a shared generative planning algorithm assumed to approximate people's intuitive theory of mind about others' behavior. We test our model on a variety of animated social scenarios in two experiments. Experiment 1 features simple cases of helping and hindering. Experiment 2 features more complex interactions that require recursive reasoning, including cases where one agent affects another by merely signaling their intentions without physically acting on the world. Across both experiments, our model accurately captures participants' counterfactual simulations and intention inferences, and establishes that these two factors together explain responsibility judgments.

Counterfactual simulation in causal cognition

“…It not only affects how we learn and feel about the world (97), but also how we judge what caused what and who is to blame. I presented the counterfactual simulation model (CSM) -a computational account that captures people's causal and responsibility judgments across a variety of scenarios in the physical and social domain (41,126).…”

“…Because of this principled way in which mental states cause actions, an observer can reason backward from an action to the likely mental states that caused it. And because one person's utility can include another person's utility, this framework also supports inferences about social interactions, such as whether one person intended to help or hinder another (47,91,114,102,126,21).…”

“…The CSM not only predicts causal responsibility in physical scenarios, but also moral responsibility in social settings (126). There is a rich literature in social psychology detailing how judgments of responsibilty and blame depend on several factors, including a person's mental states (e.g., their intention and foresight) and what reasons they had for acting (e.g.…”

“…Causation happens not only between billiard balls but between people, too (48,38,1). When people assign responsibility, they care about what causal role a person's action played in bringing about the outcome (34,130,74), and what the action revealed about the person (40,75,125,107,126,68,23).…”

“…To what extent was blue responsible for red's success? When participants answer this question, they care both about what the action reveals about the agent's intention, and what causal role it played (126).…”