Lucky or clever? From expectations to responsibility judgments

How do people hold others responsible for the consequences of their actions? We propose a computational model that attributes responsibility as a function of what the observed action reveals about the person, and the causal role that the person's action played in bringing about the outcome. The model first infers what type of person someone is from having observed their action. It then compares a prior expectation of how a person would behave with a posterior expectation after having observed the person's action. The model predicts that a person is blamed for negative outcomes to the extent that the posterior expectation is lower than the prior, and credited for positive outcomes if the posterior is greater than the prior. We model the causal role of a person's action by using a counterfactual model that considers how close the action was to having been pivotal for the outcome. The model captures participants' responsibility judgments to a high degree of quantitative accuracy across three experiments that cover a range of different situations. It also solves an existing puzzle in the literature on the relationship between action expectations and responsibility judgments. Whether an unexpected action yields more or less credit depends on whether the action was diagnostic for good or bad future performance.

人们如何对他人行为的后果承担责任？本研究提出了一种计算模型，该模型将责任归因于观察到的行为所揭示的个体特质及其行为在促成结果中所扮演的因果角色。模型首先通过观察个体的行为推断出其个体类型，然后对比在观察到个体行为之前的先验期望与之后的后验期望。模型预测，当后验期望低于先验期望时，个体将被责备负面的结果，而在后验期望高于先验期望时，个体则应获得正面的评价。模型通过考虑行为与结果之间因果关系的反事实模型来模拟个体行为的作用。该模型在三个实验中捕捉到了参与者对责任的判断，这些实验覆盖了多种不同情境，并在数量上达到了高度准确。此外，该模型还解决了关于行为期望与责任判断之间关系的文献中存在的难题。一个意外行为是否能够获得更多或更少的评价，取决于该行为是否对未来的良好或不良表现具有诊断性作用。