Causal judgments about atypical actions are influenced by agents’ epistemic states

Kirfel, Lara; Lagnado, David A.

doi:10.31234/osf.io/yvstb

Cited by 7 publications

(15 citation statements)

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“…Among the many possibilities, counterfactual sampling models have had particular success [10,11,12,13,14]. These models account for known effects of probability [2,13,15,16], the presence of alternative causes [17,18], temporal recency [12,19,20], and foreseeability [21] on causal judgments, among other phenomena. Counterfactual sampling models have even been shown to predict eye movements during causal judgment [22,23] and judgments of omissive causation [24,25].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling Confidence in Causal Judgments

O’Neill

Henne

Pearson³

et al. 2021

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The human capacity for causal judgment has long been thought to depend on an ability to consider counterfactual alternatives: the lightning strike caused the forest fire because had it not struck, the forest fire would not have ensued. To accommodate psychological effects on causal judgment, a range of recent accounts of causal judgment have proposed that people probabilistically sample counterfactual alternatives from which they compute a graded index of causal strength. While such models have had success in describing the influence of probability on causal judgments, among other effects, we show that these models make further untested predictions: probability should also influence people's metacognitive confidence in their causal judgments. In a large (N=3020) sample of participants in a causal judgment task, we found evidence that normality indeed influences people's confidence in their causal judgments and that these influences were predicted by a counterfactual sampling model. We take this result as supporting evidence for existing Bayesian accounts of causal judgment.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling Confidence in Causal Judgments

O’Neill

Henne

Pearson³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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“…the action that caused the outcome. Integrating epistemic states into causal models and counterfactual frameworks allows us to explain why people often attribute decreased causality to ignorant agents (Hilton, McClure, & Moir, 2016;Hilton & Slugoski, 1986;Kirfel & Lagnado, 2021;Lombrozo, 2010;Samland & Waldmann, 2016a). We present an extension to current counterfactual accounts by introducing epistemic state variables, and we test this extension by investigating people's causal judgments in four experiments.…”

Section: Aim Of This Papermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While ignorant Romeo might not be blamed for Juliet's death, the causal role of Romeo's acting in Juliet's death seems undisputed at first glance. Recent studies in causal cognition, however, find evidence that agents' epistemic states such as knowledge or ignorance also influence people's causal judgments (Darley & Pittman, 2003;Hilton et al, 2016;Kirfel & Lagnado, 2020;Lagnado & Channon, 2008;Lombrozo, 2010). Agents lacking knowledge (Gilbert, Tenney, Holland, & Spellman, 2015) or foreseeability of the consequences of their actions (Lagnado & Channon, 2008) are judged to be less of a cause for the outcome.…”

Section: Causation By Ignorancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…If the proximal cause is a human action, the agent is judged as more causal if the agent was aware of the causal opportunity created by prior events (Hilton et al, 2016). Likewise, people's preference for abnormal actions as causes has been shown to be moderated by the agents' knowledge states about their actions (Kirfel & Lagnado, 2020;Kirfel & Phillips, 2021;Samland, Josephs, Waldmann, & Rakoczy, 2016). There is a close connection between the development of causal reasoning and theory of mind: Children produce more causal language for knowingly caused events than for unintentionally or object-caused events (Muentener & Lakusta, 2011) and attribute more causality to a human hand engaging in deliberate, goal-directed action, rather than a mere accidental movement (Leslie, 1984;Muentener & Carey, 2010).…”

Section: Causation By Ignorancementioning

confidence: 99%

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Changing Minds ― Epistemic Interventions in Causal Reasoning

Kirfel¹,

Lagnado²

2021

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Did Tom’s use of nuts in the dish cause Billy’s allergic reaction? According to counterfactual theories of causation, an agent is judged a cause to the extent that their action made a difference to the outcome (Gerstenberg, Goodman, Lagnado, & Tenenbaum, 2020; Gerstenberg, Halpern, & Tenenbaum, 2015; Halpern, 2016; Hitchcock & Knobe, 2009). In this paper, we argue for the integration of epistemic states into current counterfactual accounts of causation. In the case of ignorant causal agents, we demonstrate that people’s counterfactual reasoning primarily targets the agent’s epistemic state – what the agent doesn’t know –, and their epistemic actions – what they could have done to know – rather than the agent’s actual causal action. In four experiments, we show that people’s causal judgment as well as their reasoning about alternatives is sensitive to the epistemic conditions of a causal agent: Knowledge vs. ignorance (Experiment 1), self-caused vs. externally caused ignorance (Experiment 2), the number of epistemic actions (Experiment 3), and the epistemic context (Experiment 4). We see two advantages in integrating epistemic states into causal models and counterfactual frameworks. First, assuming the intervention on indirect, epistemic causes might allow us to explain why people attribute decreased causality to ignorant vs. knowing causal agents. Moreover, causal agents’ epistemic states pick out those factors that can be controlled or manipulated in order to achieve desirable future outcomes, reflecting the forward-looking dimension of causality. We discuss our findings in the broader context of moral and causal cognition.

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“…A popular explanation is that lightning is statistically abnormal, which allows it to stand out from more normal events like the lack of rain (Gerstenberg & Icard, 2020;Hart & Honoré, 1985;Henne et al, 2017;Henne et al, 2021b;Hilton & Slugoski, 1986;Icard et al, 2017;Kahneman & Miller, 1986;Knobe & Fraser, 2008;McGrath, 2005). In addition to normality, research also indicates that people are more likely to judge events as causal when they are temporally recent (Henne et al, 2021a;Lagnado & Channon, 2008;Spellman, 1997), necessary or sufficient (Icard et al, 2017;Pearl, 2009), robust to a range of background circumstances (Gerstenberg et al, 2021;Grinfeld et al, 2020;Hitchcock, 2012;Lombrozo, 2010;Quillien, 2020;Vasilyeva et al, 2018;Woodward, 2006), intentional or agentive (Alicke et al, 2011;Kirfel & Lagnado, 2021;Lagnado & Channon, 2008), connected through a physical process (Wolff, 2007;Wolff et al, 2010), and when there are few alternate causes (Lagnado et al, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Confidence and gradation in causal judgment

et al. 2022

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When comparing the roles of the lightning strike and the dry climate in causing the forest fire, one might think that the lightning strike is more of a cause than the dry climate, or one might think that the lightning strike completely caused the fire while the dry conditions did not cause it at all. Psychologists and philosophers have long debated whether such causal judgments are graded; that is, whether people treat some causes as stronger than others. To address this debate, we first reanalyzed data from four recent studies. We found that causal judgments were actually multimodal: although most causal judgments made on a continuous scale were categorical, there was also some gradation. We then tested two competing explanations for this gradation: the confidence explanation, which states that people make graded causal judgments because they have varying degrees of belief in causal relations, and the strength explanation, which states that people make graded causal judgments because they believe that causation itself is graded. Experiment 1 tested the confidence explanation and showed that gradation in causal judgments was indeed moderated by confidence: people tended to make graded causal judgments when they were unconfident, but they tended to make more categorical causal judgments when they were confident. Experiment 2 tested the causal strength explanation and showed that although confidence still explained variation in causal judgments, it did not explain away the effects of normality, causal structure, or the number of candidate causes. Overall, we found that causal judgments were multimodal and that people make graded judgments both when they think a cause is weak and when they are uncertain about its causal role.

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Causal judgments about atypical actions are influenced by agents’ epistemic states

Cited by 7 publications

References 54 publications

Modeling Confidence in Causal Judgments

Modeling Confidence in Causal Judgments

Changing Minds ― Epistemic Interventions in Causal Reasoning

Confidence and gradation in causal judgment

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