Immoral Professors and Malfunctioning Tools: Counterfactual Relevance Accounts Explain the Effect of Norm Violations on Causal Selection.

ABSTRACT: Causal judgments are widely known to be sensitive to violations of both prescriptive norms (e.g., immoral events) and statistical norms (e.g., improbable events). There is ongoing discussion as to whether both effects are best explained in a unified way through changes in the relevance of counterfactual possibilities, or whether these two effects arise from unrelated cognitive mechanisms. Recent work has shown that moral norm violations affect causal judgments of agents, but not inanimate artifacts used by those agents. These results have been interpreted as showing that prescriptive norm violations only affect causal reasoning about intentional agents, but not the use of inanimate artifacts, thereby providing evidence that the effect of prescriptive norm violations arises from mechanisms

SUBMITTER: Kominsky JF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6871661 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature