Attribution of Responsibility Between Agents in a Causal Chain

• DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/863eq
• Publication Date: 2024-05-02T17:29:58Z
• Authors: Vanessa Cheung; Mengxuan Qiao; Teneille Brown; David Lagnado
• Keywords: Judgment and Decision Making; Cognitive Psychology; Social and Behavioral Sciences

When ordinary people hear about a `hired gun' killing, who do they judge to be more responsible -- the person who instigated the killing or the person who executed it? In this paper, we explored the attribution of causal and moral responsibility in a causal chain of events, where an agent A instructs an intermediate agent B to execute some harmful action which leads to a bad outcome to a victim V. In Study 1, participants judged B to be more of a cause, more blameworthy, and more deserving of punishment than A. In Study 2, we explored the effect of proximity by adding a third, subsequent contributing cause, such that B's action no longer as closely and directly caused the final bad outcome. Across three vignettes, participants judged both agents to be less causal, blameworthy, and deserving of punishment when they were less proximal to the outcome, but still judged B to be more morally and causally responsible than A in all conditions. In Study 3, we varied whether each of the two agents (A and B) intended for the final outcome to occur. We found an interaction between role and intent, where participants only mitigated causal and moral judgments for A when A did not intend for the outcome to occur -- regardless of B's intent. We discuss possible explanations for our findings and its implications for moral and legal decision-making.