Article Instance

HTTP 200 OK
Allow: GET
Content-Type: application/json
Vary: Accept

{
    "pk": 28522,
    "title": "I know what you did last summer (and how often).\nEpistemic states and statistical normality in causal judgements",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "When several causes contributed to an outcome, we often\nsingle out one causal factor as being “more of a cause” than\nothers. What explains this selection? Existing research\nsuggests that people’s judgements of actual causation can be\ninfluenced by the degree to which they regard certain events as\nnorm-deviant, or “abnormal” (Hart & Honoré, 1963;\nKahneman & Miller, 1986; Hitchcock & Knobe, 2009; Halpern\n& Hitchcock 2015). In this paper, we argue that statistical\nabnormality influences causal judgements about human agents\nby changing the agents’ epistemic states (Epistemic\nHypothesis). In Experiment 1, we replicate previous findings\nthat people assign more causal strength to a statistically\nabnormally acting agent, but show that they also assign them\nmore knowledge about the behaviour of their peers. In\nExperiment 2, we show that in case of equal epistemic\nuncertainty, people do not differentiate between statistically\nabnormal and normal causal agents. In Experiment 3, we\nexplore the difference between type and token abnormality,\nand find that a token abnormal, but type normal behaviour still\ninfluences causal judgments, with people’s epistemic\njudgments mirroring these causal judgments. We discuss the\nimplications of this research for current norm-frameworks in\ncausal cognition.",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "statistical norms"
        },
        {
            "word": "normality"
        },
        {
            "word": "causal judgment"
        },
        {
            "word": "counterfactual reasoning"
        },
        {
            "word": "epistemic states"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Papers with Oral Presentations",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6s6130ht",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Lara",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Kirfel",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "University College London",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "David",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Lagnado",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "University College London",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2019-01-01T18:00:00Z",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28522/galley/18393/download/"
        }
    ]
}