{"pk":49270,"title":"Cause and fault in development","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Responsibility requires causation. But there are different kinds of causes. Some are connected to their effects; others are disconnected. We ask how children's developing ability to distinguish causes relates to their understanding of moral responsibility. We found in Experiment 1 that when Andy hits Suzy with his bike, she falls into a fence and it breaks, 3-year-old children treated ``caused'', ``break'' and ``fault'' as referring to the direct cause, Suzy. By 4, they differentiated causes: Andy ``caused'' the fence to break, it's his ``fault'', but Suzy ``broke'' it. We found in Experiment 2 that when the chain involved disconnection, 3-year-olds focused only on the direct cause. Around 5 they distinguished causes, saying that the disconnecting cause ``caused'' an object to break, it's their ``fault'', but the direct cause ``broke'' it.  Our findings relate to the outcome-to-intention shift in moral responsibility and suggest a more fundamental shift in children's understanding of causation.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Linguistics; Philosophy; Psychology; Causal reasoning; Cognitive development; Development; Language and thought; Language understanding; Social cognition; Developmental analysis"}],"section":"Papers with Oral Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/26s3s2tk","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"David","middle_name":"","last_name":"Rose","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford","department":""},{"first_name":"Cici","middle_name":"","last_name":"Hou","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Shaun","middle_name":"","last_name":"Nichols","name_suffix":"","institution":"Cornell University","department":""},{"first_name":"Tobias","middle_name":"","last_name":"Gerstenberg","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Ellen","middle_name":"M","last_name":"Markman","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49270/galley/37231/download/"}]}