Now out!✨ If thinking about the philosophical foundations of criminal liability excites you, this article may just be for you.😁

Available here: www.elgaronline.com/view/journal...

…asking for their causal judgements prior to the outcome’s occurrence, or by allowing them to reflect on the irrelevance of the norm, they find the effects to largely subside. Okay, so perhaps ordinary causal judgement really is biased – but why should we care? /9

Over the course of five experiments, we try to see whether this effect can be explained by recourse to some relevant mediating variable – to no avail. Yet when they confront participants with debiasing techniques, such as… /8

In one scenario, participants were told of an agent who, contrary to some music festival’s policy, wore a different coloured hat. Later, some powder was fired into the crowd which, upon coming into contact with the agent’s cigarette, exploded. Who caused the explosion? /6

Instead of looking who caused the accident and approportioning blame accordingly, they argue that the mechanism frequently is reversed: we see that some agent violated a norm, and want to ‘stick it’ to them. And what better way than to render their contribution more causal? /4

Are our ordinary causal judgements biased?🔍And if so, is this really a problem?🧐Yes and yes✅, we (Markus Kneer and I) argue our newest paper! A short thread 🧵 /1

Open access: shorturl.at/FcWDF

Hi @yalelawschool-yls.bsky.social :-P