_cries in £20k London PhD stipend_

For many more wacky vignettes and a thorough discussion of the findings both for the law and the literature on ordinary causal judgement more generally, check out the paper!😇 /12

🔗 sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

…is biased, then this spells trouble for the law! After all, it would be patently unjust to hold an agent liable for some unrelated harm due to the colour of their hat or the knot with which they tie their trash bag (to give another example of a silly norm that was tested). /11

There is one area of our lives in which causal judgements are especially consequential: the law!🧑‍⚖️ Interestingly, several jurisdictions explicitly peg their legal concept of causation to its ordinary counterpart. But if the ordinary concept of causation… /10

…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

What they find is startling: participants deem the blue-hat-wearing agent, and not the technician, as the cause! However, when they are told that the agent wore the right coloured hat, participants’ causal judgements reverse, and they now deem the technician as the cause. /7

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

In order to demonstrate that ordinary causal reasoning really is biased – and not just, say, inextricably connected to judgements of responsibility and blame – we explore whether the Norm Effect arises even for the violation of entirely silly norms🤪. /5

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

In our paper, we try to shed light on the mechanisms that drive the Norm Effect. Over the course of five experiments (N=2’688), we argue that the Norm Effect largely is the product of a blame-driven bias! /3

When two agents jointly bring about an outcome, while one of the agents is violating some prescriptive norm, we ordinarily deem the norm-violating agent as ‘the’ cause of the outcome. This is known as the Norm Effect. /2

Congratulations, incredible work!

Thank you!

Really interesting! Would love to read up on this, but the link isn't working for me

Heck yeah! Can't wait to watch these!!!

This has been hailed as one of the usecases of blockchain. I remember a crypto coin that was promising just this (safe and transparent identity verification). Do you think this could be promising, or would you prefer a government body do it?

Thanks a lot, JP, very kind of you!