Causation and the Silly Norm Effect

Abstract

Whereas in certain domains, the law relies on terms of art (e.g., "injunction, " "double jeopardy, " "punitive damages, " and "bankruptcy"), in others-in particular in criminal law-it invokes, or takes itself to invoke, the plain everyday meaning of the expressions used. is is unsurprising: citizens, standardly not equipped with a law degree, must understand what the law says in order to adhere to it. Furthermore, in common law jurisdictions, nonexperts help decide court cases in jury trials. And when it comes to disputes in statutory interpretation among judges, turning to ordinary meaning is one, if not-as some scholars and practitioners argue 1 -the evident strategy to resolve them. 2 According to what we term the correspondence assumption, certain central legal expressions are taken to refer to the same concepts as their corresponding ordinary language analogues (at least within designated spheres of the law). Candidate concepts for the correspondence assumption are plentiful. Consent is one. At a recent sexual misconduct trial in the United States, the judge refused to provide conceptual classification and stated that "the jury will decide what consent means to them" (Puente, Sloan, & Deerwester, 2018; for empirical work on the notion of consent, see Sommers, 2020). e expression "reasonable" and the concept it denotes constitute another example. As Gardner (2015) writes, the reasonable person standard "exists to allow the law to pass the buck, to help itself pro tempore to standards of justification that are not themselves set by the law" (p. 36). Naturally, for a maneuver of this sort to even begin to make sense, it must be assumed that the lay person's concept of reasonableness fits the law's demands. 3 In many jurisdictions, the central mens rea concepts, such as intention, are subject to the correspondence assumption-which is perhaps one of the key reasons why, very frequently, they are le partially or entirely uncodified. 4 e English courts have made this explicit stating that "the legal meaning of the word 'intention' is the ordinary meaning of the word" (Herring, 2012, p. 135). In R v. Moloney [1985], Lord Bridge put it as follows:

Causation, Norms, and Cognitive Bias

“…Our experiment also replicated preliminary findings according to which nonpertinent and silly norms exert an effect on blame and causation (Güver & Kneer, 2023). These results directly challenge the Responsibility View.…”

“…Experiment 2 explores whether a more permissive version of the Responsibility View, which ties folk causality not to moral responsibility proper, but to perceived moral responsibility, could explain the results reported in Experiment 1. As briefly sketched above, the extent to which such a view is plausible is another matter (see also Güver & Kneer, 2023).…”

“…Now imagine a slight variation of the situationthe addition of a norm prohibiting Mark from rollerblading on the path -and ask again: who caused the accident? Mark's violation of a salient norm leads to a drastic shift in participants' judgements, the majority now considering Mark the cause (Güver & Kneer, 2023). This is an example of the Norm Effect, and several accounts compete to explain the underlying causal mechanisms (e.g.…”

Attribution of Responsibility Between Agents in a Causal Chain of Events

“…In the law, such interruptions to the causal chain can relieve responsibility of the distal agent(s) -but do laypeople make judgments of responsibility consistent with these assumptions? We aim to answer these questions in this paper, and build on existing work on how folk and legal ascriptions of causation are similar and where they differ (e.g., Güver & Kneer, 2023;Knobe & Shapiro, 2021).…”

Experimental Metaphysics: Causation

“…Another set of explanations for the effect of norms on causal judgment is what I will refer to as blame explanations. These models hold that people's tendency to blame agents for their actions affects their causal judgments about those agents (Alicke 1992, 2008, Alicke et al 2011, Güver and Kneer 2022, Rogers et al 2019). Alicke's culpable-control model in particular puts this cognitive process into a temporal sequence (Alicke 2000).…”