Making a difference: Responsibility, causality and counterfactuals

In order to be held responsible, a person's action has to have made some sort of difference to the outcome. In this paper, we propose a counterfactual replacement model according to which people attribute responsibility by comparing their prior expectation about how an agent was going to act in a given situation, with their posterior expectation after having observed the agent's action. The model predicts blame if the posterior expectation is worse than the prior expectation and credit if it is better. In a novel experiment, we manipulate people's prior expectations by changing the framing of a structurally isomorphic task. As predicted by our counterfactual replacement model, people's prior expectations significantly influenced their responsibility attributions. We also show how our model can capture Johnson and Rips's (2013) findings that an agent is attributed less responsibility for bringing about a positive outcome when their action was suboptimal rather than optimal.

Social Cognition, 1985

Cognition, 2012

Attributions of responsibility play a critical role in many group interactions. This paper explores the role of causal and counterfactual reasoning in blame attributions in groups. We develop a general framework that builds on the notion of pivotality: an agent is pivotal if she could have changed the group outcome by acting differently. In three experiments we test successive refinements of this notion – whether an agent is pivotal in close possible situations and the number of paths to achieve pivotality. In order to discriminate between potential models, we introduced group tasks with asymmetric structures. Some group members were complements (for the two to contribute to the group outcome it was necessary that both succeed) whereas others were substitutes (for the two to contribute to the group outcome it was sufficient that one succeeds). Across all three experiments we found that people’s attributions were sensitive to the number of paths to pivotality. In particular, an agent incurred more blame for a team loss in the presence of a successful complementary peer than in the presence of a successful substitute.

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1983

The causal structures for each of four types of situations-interpersonal failure, noninterpersonal failure, interpersonal success, and noninterpersonal successwere explored and compared. A first group of subjects generated plausible causes for five specific situations in each of the four general types of situations. A second group of subjects provided similarity data on these causes, which were used in a cluster analysis of the causes. A third group of subjects rated the generated causes on each of six dimensions reported in the attribution literature: changeability, locus, stability, intentionality, globality, and controllability. Analyses of the clusters of causes and the ratings revealed (a) different types of causes were generated for different types of situations, (b) different types of situations led people to generate causes that differ in dimensional location, (c) the various causal dimensions were highly intercorrelated. These findings were applied to A. W. Kruglanski's (Psychological Review, 1980,tV) model of attribution processes. In addition, implications for the study of interpersonal situations and for the cognition-motivation debate over "self-serving" bias in attribution were discussed. Finally, several methodological issues were examined. Making attributions for experienced or observed events is a basic cognitive process. When faced with important, unusual, or unexpected events we search for meaningful explanations of their causes (Heider,

How do people attribute responsibility in situations where the contributions of multiple agents combine to produce a joint outcome? The prevalence of over-determination in such cases makes this a difficult problem for counterfactual theories of causal responsibility. In this article, we explore a general framework for assigning responsibility in multiple agent contexts. We draw on the structural model account of actual causation (e.g., Halpern & Pearl, 2005) and its extension to responsibility judgments (Chockler & Halpern, 2004). We review the main theoretical and empirical issues that arise from this literature and propose a novel model of intuitive judgments of responsibility. This model is a function of both pivotality (whether an agent made a difference to the outcome) and criticality (how important the agent is perceived to be for the outcome, before any actions are taken). The model explains empirical results from previous studies and is supported by a new experiment that manipulates both pivotality and criticality. We also discuss possible extensions of this model to deal with a broader range of causal situations. Overall, our approach emphasizes the close interrelations between causality, counterfactuals, and responsibility attributions.

1975

In order to be held responsible, a person’s action has to have made some sort of difference to the outcome. In this paper, we propose a counterfactual replacement model according to which people attribute responsibility by comparing their prior expectation about how an agent was going to act in a given situation, with their posterior expectation after having observed the agent’s action. The model predicts blame if the posterior expectation is worse than the prior expectation and credit if it is better. In a novel experiment, we manipulate people’s prior expectations by changing the framing of a structurally isomorphic task. As predicted by our counterfactual replacement model, people’s prior expectations significantly influenced their responsibility attributions. We also show how our model can capture Johnson and Rips’s (2013) findings that an agent is attributed less responsibility for bringing about a positive outcome when their action was suboptimal rather than optimal.

In the target article "A Theory of Blame," the authors set out their multi-stage path model for how people assign blame to individuals for the consequences of their actions. The article addresses, and connects, several large bodies of empirical literature from psychologyincluding causation, morality, emotion, and attribution. We are sympathetic with, and supportive of, many of its claims. We particularly like the model's nuanced integration of numerous important constructs (e.g., morality, social warrant, obligation, mental state inferences) into the assessment of blame, which creates specific testable hypotheses not only about whether and which information affects blame judgments but also when and why it does so.

In two experiments, we established an order effect in responsibility attributions. In line with Spellman (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 126: 323–348, 1997), who proposed that a person’s perceived causal contribution varies with the degree to which it changes the probability of the eventual outcome, Experiment 1 showed that in a team challenge in which the players contribute sequentially, the last player’s blame or credit is attenuated if the team’s result has already been determined prior to her acting. Experiment 2 illustrated that this attenuation effect does not overgeneralize to situations in which the experienced order of events does not map onto the objective order of events; the level of the last person’s performance is only discounted if that person knew that the result was already determined. Furthermore, Experiment 1 demonstrated that responsibility attributions remain sensitive to differences in performance, even if the outcome is already determined. We suggest a theoretical extension of Spellman’s model, according to which participants’ responsibility attributions are determined not only by whether a contribution made a difference in the actual situation, but also by whether it would have made a difference had things turned out somewhat differently.