Causality and responsibility judgments

Quantitative response data from a series of experiments on responsibility attribution<p>This project aims to identify the principles that underlie people's attributions of cause, responsibility and blame in social contexts.

This is a complex problem, because people's judgments are responsive to many factors, including the intentions and foreknowledge of the agents involved, and subtle interactions between the different parties. As a guiding framework the project will test and develop a structural model approach to attribution, based upon notions of counterfactual dependence and active causal pathways between events. This approach maintains that assignments of credit and blame are driven by people's causal models, but allows for dissociations between what is judged a cause and what is singled out for blame.

The project will use experimental studies to test the applicability of the structural model in everyday human attributions. These studies will explore a variety of contexts, including interactive games with multiple players. The complex interactions between players in competitive games present a novel and rich environment to investigate people's attributions. In addition, the project will investigate how people construct and communicate the causal models that underpin their attributions.

These studies will examine how people transform scenarios into causal models, and how these models affect their subsequent judgments of cause and blame.</p>