Immoral Professors and Malfunctioning Tools: Counterfactual Relevance Accounts Explain the Effect of Norm Violations on Causal Selection

Abstract

Causal judgments are widely known to be sensitive to violations of both prescriptive norms (e.g., immoral events) and statistical norms (e.g., improbable events). There is ongoing discussion as to whether both effects are best explained in a unified way through changes in the relevance of counterfactual possibilities, or whether these two effects arise from unrelated cognitive mechanisms. Recent work has shown that moral norm violations affect causal judgments of agents, but not inanimate artifacts used by those agents. These results have been interpreted as showing that prescriptive norm violations only affect causal reasoning about intentional agents, but not the use of inanimate artifacts, thereby providing evidence that the effect of prescriptive norm violations arises from mechanisms specific to reasoning about intentional agents, and thus casting doubt on a unified counterfactual analysis of causal reasoning. Four experiments explore this recent finding and provide clear support for a unified counterfactual analysis. Experiment 1 demonstrates that these newly observed patterns in causal judgments are closely mirrored by judgments of counterfactual relevance. Experiment 2 shows that the relationship between causal and counterfactual judgments is moderated by causal structure, as uniquely predicted by counterfactual accounts. Experiment 3 directly manipulates the relevance of counterfactual alternatives and finds that causal judgments of intentional agents and inanimate artifacts are similarly affected. Finally, Experiment 4 shows that prescriptive norm violations (in which artifacts malfunction) affect causal judgments of inanimate artifacts in much the same way that prescriptive norm violations (in which agents act immorally) affect causal judgments of intentional agents.

A counterfactual simulation model of causal judgments for physical events

“…Mandel's (2003) results show that there are situations in which explicit causal and counterfactual judgments dissociate. These results don't show, however, that causal and counterfactual judgments are unrelated (see also Kominsky & Phillips, 2019). Indeed, as we will suggest below, counterfactuals play a critical role in defining what it means for something to have been sufficient in the circumstances, and for analyzing how the outcome came about.…”

How We Know What Not To Think

“…In a similar way, people tend to focus on counterfactual possibilities involving actions that have a relatively high value. Consequently, they also tend to select lower-value events as causes [32,36,40,[42][43][44][45]. Box 2 provides a detailed overview of this evidence.…”

“…Box 2 provides a detailed overview of this evidence. In brief, causal judgments depend on reasoning about alternative possibilities, and the alternative possible actions that come to mind tend to be probable and valuable [7,36,38,40,[42][43][44][45]. This is, of course, the signature of default modal cognition.…”

“…Most people select Professor Smith, not the administrator [44]. This effect -that actions with low moral value are judged more causal -is highly general and has been documented across a wide range of stimuli (from vignette studies [36,[42][43][44] to visual displays [21,68]), methods (from survey questions to eye-tracking [21,41]), and populations (from adults to children [21,36,[41][42][43][44][45]68]).…”

“…Second, the pattern is eliminated if the low-value action was not necessary for the effect to occur, implicating an assessment of counterfactual dependence [36,[42][43][44]. Third, the effect is mediated by judgments of how relevant each counterfactual is: people judge the counterfactual where the professor did not take the pen to be more relevant than the one where the administrator did not take the pen [32,43]. These results suggest that our reasoning about possible actions is sensitive to value, and provide a case study of default modal reasoning in high-level cognition.…”