Figure 3 - uploaded by Levin Güver
Content may be subject to copyright.
Source publication
In many spheres, the law takes the legal concept of causation to correspond to the folk concept (the correspondence assumption). Courts, including the US Supreme Court, tend to insist on the "common understanding" and that which is "natural to say" (Burrage v. United States) when it comes to expressions relating to causation, and frequently refuse...
Context in source publication
Citations
... Who caused the accident? This time, participants overwhelmingly point to Mark: the violation of a salient norm has led to a drastic shift in their judgements (Güver & Kneer, 2023a). This difference in causal ascription across the no norm v. norm conditions is called the Norm Effect, and several accounts compete to explain it (for a review, see Willemsen & Kirfel, 2019; more generally, see Rose & Danks, 2012;Livengood & Rose, 2016;Henne, 2023;Bebb & Beebee, 2024). ...
... Our experiment also replicated preliminary findings according to which nonpertinent and silly norms exert an effect on blame and causation (Güver & Kneer, 2023a, 2023b. Recall that the nonpertinent and silly norm conditions were explicitly designed so that violating them would not make the agent more morally responsible for the outcome, given the clear lack of connection between the norm violation (e.g. ...
... One area where these findings are of great importance is the law: both in torts and criminal law, the actus reus (the "guilty act") is one of the two key determinants of liability besides mens rea (the "guilty mind"), and in common law jurisdictions (such as the UK and the US), the actus reus -or, simply put, causation -is determined by lay juries (Knobe & Shapiro, 2021;Lagnado & Gerstenberg, 2017;Lagnado, 2021;Engelmann & Kirfel, 2024). Furthermore, as Güver & Kneer (2023a) have elaborated, legal practitioners tend to hold that the legal notion of causation corresponds to the ordinary notion. Lord Wright, for instance, has stated in a landmark English case that "[c]ausation is to be understood as the man in the street, and not as the scientist or the metaphysician, would understand it." ...
Extant research has shown that ordinary causal judgments are sensitive to normative factors. For instance, agents who violate a norm are standardly deemed more causal than norm-conforming agents in identical situations. In this paper, we present novel findings that go against predictions made by several competing accounts that aim to explain this so-called "Norm Effect". By aid of a series of five preregistered experiments (N = 2'688), we show that participants deem agents who violate nonpertinent or silly norms-norms that do not relate to the outcome at hand, or for which there is little independent justification-as more causal. Furthermore, this curious effect cannot be explained by aid of potential mediators such as foreknowledge, desire or foreseeability of harm. The "Silly Norm Effect", we argue, spells trouble for several views of folk causality in the literature, and lends support to a Bias View, according to which Norm Effects are the result of blame-driven bias. We close with a discussion of the relevance of these findings for the just assessment of causation in the law.
... However, we would expect normality effects on causal judgments to generalize to participants from various social groups, as well as to experiments with other kinds of stimuli (see Gerstenberg & Icard, 2020;Henne, O'Neill, et al., 2021, for examples with video-based stimuli). We manipulated statistical norms by varying the probability of different events, but similar findings have also been found with prescriptive or social norms that are presumably more sensitive to cultural factors (e.g., Güver & Kneer, 2023;Icard et al., 2017). Finally, we note that the predicted quadratic relationship between mean causal judgment and mean confidence is specific to causal structures with binary variables, and so this relationship should not be expected to generalize to cases with continuous variables. ...
Counterfactual theories propose that people’s capacity for causal judgment depends on their ability to consider alternative possibilities: The lightning strike caused the forest fire because had it not struck, the forest fire would not have ensued. To accommodate a variety of psychological effects on causal judgment, a range of recent accounts have proposed that people probabilistically sample counterfactual alternatives from which they compute a graded measure of causal strength. While such models successfully describe the influence of the statistical normality (i.e., the base rate) of the candidate and alternate causes on causal judgments, we show that they make further untested predictions about how normality influences people’s confidence in their causal judgments. In a large (N = 3,020) sample of participants in a causal judgment task, we found that normality indeed influences people’s confidence in their causal judgments and that these influences were predicted by a counterfactual sampling model in which people are more confident in a causal relationship when the effect of the cause is less variable among imagined counterfactual possibilities.
... Now imagine a slight variation of the situationthe addition of a norm prohibiting Mark from rollerblading on the path -and ask again: who caused the accident? Mark's violation of a salient norm leads to a drastic shift in participants' judgements, the majority now considering Mark the cause (Güver & Kneer, 2023). This is an example of the Norm Effect, and several accounts compete to explain the underlying causal mechanisms (e.g. ...
... Our experiment also replicated preliminary findings according to which nonpertinent and silly norms exert an effect on blame and causation (Güver & Kneer, 2023). These results directly challenge the Responsibility View. ...
... Experiment 2 explores whether a more permissive version of the Responsibility View, which ties folk causality not to moral responsibility proper, but to perceived moral responsibility, could explain the results reported in Experiment 1. As briefly sketched above, the extent to which such a view is plausible is another matter (see also Güver & Kneer, 2023). ...
Extant research has shown that ordinary causal judgments are sensitive to normative factors. For instance, agents who violate a norm are standardly deemed more causal than norm-conforming agents in identical situations. In this paper, we present novel findings that go against predictions made by several competing accounts that aim to explain this so-called “Norm Effect”. By aid of a series of five preregistered experiments (N = 2’688), we show that participants deem agents who violate nonpertinent or silly norms – norms that do not relate to the outcome at hand, or for which there is little independent justification – as more causal. Furthermore, this curious effect cannot be explained by aid of potential mediators such as foreknowledge, desire or foreseeability of harm. The “Silly Norm Effect”, we argue, spells trouble for several views of folk causality in the literature, and lends support to a Bias View, according to which Norm Effects are the result of blame-driven bias. We close with a discussion of the relevance of these findings for the just assessment of causation in the law.
... Courts routinely refuse to provide juries with clarifications of intention and other mens rea concepts and are only prepared to do so in exceptional cases (for discussion, see, e.g., Güver and Kneer, 2023;Herring, 2012). 1 One explanation for this is that the law, which, after all, aspires to be public, frequently assumes correspondence between legal and lay expressions and the concepts they denote (Kneer, 2022;Tobia, 2021bTobia, , 2018. Where such a Correspondence Assumption is in place and, in particular in Common Law countries, where, e.g., criminal trials are decided by lay juries, it stands to reason to investigate lay concepts which are simply supposed to be the concepts of relevance. ...
The reasonable person standard is key to both Criminal Law and Torts. What does and does not count as reasonable behavior and decision-making is frequently deter- mined by lay jurors. Hence, laypeople’s understanding of the term must be considered, especially whether they use it predominately in an evaluative fashion. In this corpus study based on supervised machine learning models, we investigate whether laypeople use the expression ‘reasonable’ mainly as a descriptive, an evaluative, or merely a value-associated term. We find that ‘reasonable’ is predicted to be an evaluative term in the majority of cases. This supports prescriptive accounts, and challenges descriptive and hybrid accounts of the term—at least given the way we operationalize the latter. Interestingly, other expressions often used interchangeably in jury instructions (e.g. ‘careful,’ ‘ordinary,’ ‘prudent,’ etc), however, are predicted to be descriptive. This indicates a discrepancy between the intended use of the term ‘reasonable’ and the understanding lay jurors might bring into the court room.
... judgements, the majority now considering Mark the cause (Güver & Kneer, 2023). This is an example of the Norm Effect, and several accounts compete to explain the underlying causal mechanisms (e.g. ; for a review, see Willemsen & Kirfel, 2019). ...
... In the following, we will explore whether the Norm Effect arises from the violation of nonpertinent or silly norm violations (see Güver & Kneer, 2023). These are norms that are either irrelevant to the outcome at hand, or patently silly. ...
A growing body of literature has revealed ordinary causal judgement to be sensitive to normative factors, such that a norm-violating agent is regarded more causal than their non-norm-violating counterpart. In this paper, we explore two competing explanations for this phenomenon: the Responsibility View and the Bias View. The Bias View, but not the Responsibility View, predicts features peripheral to the agent’s responsibility to impact causal attributions. In a series of three preregistered experiments (N = 1162), we present new evidence that the Norm Effect arises from such peripheral features, namely from nonpertinent or entirely silly norm violations. Furthermore, we show that this effect cannot be explained by recourse to the agent’s foreknowledge or desire of the outcome, nor by its foreseeability: the Norm Effect arises even when participants judge the norm-violating agent’s doing as equally foreseeable. This, we argue, provides evidence in favour of the Bias View.
... Future studies should investigate to what extent is the relation between outcome and blame expressed through causal judgments as well as ascriptions of mental states (cf. Güver & Kneer, 2022;Zehnder & Kneer, in preparation). ...
Unlabelled:
Legal and moral luck goes against the basic principle of criminal law that responsibility ascriptions are based on the mental state of the perpetrator, rather than merely the outcome of her action. If outcome should not play a decisive role in responsibility ascriptions, the attempt versus perpetration distinction becomes more difficult to justify. One potential justification is that we never know whether the attempter would not have resigned from pursuing her criminal intent even at the last moment. However, this paper argues that resigning from criminal intent and trying to stop the criminal outcome, which is called the renunciation defense, can be just as subject to outcome luck as the attempt versus perpetration distinction. And yet the availability of the renunciation defense in court is outcome dependent. I show with a series of experiments (N = 479) that outcome dependence for the renunciation defense is perceived as unjust and discuss the implications for the renunciation defense as well as attempt versus perpetration distinction.
Supplementary information:
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11229-022-04000-6.
... Future studies should investigate to what extent is the relation between outcome and blame expressed through causal judgments as well as ascriptions of mental states (cf. Güver & Kneer, 2022;Zehnder & Kneer, in preparation). The second limitation concerns the language of criminal law. ...
Legal and moral luck goes against the basic principle of criminal law that responsibility ascriptions are based on the mental state of the perpetrator, rather than merely the outcome of her action. If outcome should not play a decisive role in responsibility ascriptions, the attempt versus perpetration distinction becomes more difficult to justify. One potential justification is that we never know whether the attempter would not have resigned from pursuing her criminal intent even at the last moment. However, this paper argues that resigning from criminal intent and trying to stop the criminal outcome, which is called the renunciation defense, can be just as subject to outcome luck as the attempt versus perpetration distinction. And yet the availability of the renunciation defense in court is outcome dependent. I show with a series of experiments (N=479) that outcome dependence for the renunciation defense is perceived as unjust and discuss the implications for the renunciation defense as well as attempt versus perpetration distinction.
Experimental jurisprudence (or “X-Jur”) addresses questions of jurisprudence or legal philosophy by complementing traditional philosophical analysis with empirical methods. Often those methods include survey experiments that examine laypeople’s intuitions about legal-philosophical thought experiments and concepts of legal significance (e.g., causation, intent, reasonableness). Other times, experimental jurisprudence focuses on the cognitive processes underlying legal reasoning. This entry reviews representative work in experimental jurisprudence and discusses major objections and critiques.
This handbook introduces readers to the emerging field of experimental jurisprudence, which applies new empirical methods to address fundamental philosophical questions in legal theory. The book features contributions from a global group of leading professors of law, philosophy, and psychology, covering a diverse range of topics such as criminal law, legal interpretation, torts, property, procedure, evidence, health, disability, and international law. Across thirty-eight chapters, the handbook utilizes a variety of methods, including traditional philosophical analysis, psychology survey studies and experiments, eye-tracking methods, neuroscience, behavioural methods, linguistic analysis, and natural language processing. The book also addresses cutting-edge issues such as legal expertise, gender and race in the law, and the impact of AI on legal practice. In addition to examining United States law, the work also takes a comparative approach that spans multiple legal systems, discussing the implications of experimental jurisprudence in Australia, Germany, Mexico, and the United Kingdom.
