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.

We test the importance people attribute to the realization of small gains in outcome value for cases where the decision-maker must competitively distribute significant harm between separate groups. We find that, in line with recent non-consequentialist moral theories, subjects (i) sometimes rank giving those that stand to suffer harm equal chances above maximizing outcome value and (ii) that whether they opt for equal chance procedures (‘coin flips’) depends on the magnitude of the value that can be secured by not offering them. Our findings vindicate the idea that there can be ‘irrelevant utilities’ in cases of competing claims to avoid harm. Our study thus extends existing work on decision-making in conflict of harm cases along several dimensions, and we demonstrate their import for determining which version of ‘partially aggregative’ accounts in normative ethics aligns best with common sense.

The concept of a good life is usually assumed by philosophers to be equivalent to that of well-being, or perhaps of a morally good life, and hence has received little attention as a potentially distinct subject matter. In a series of experiments participants were presented with vignettes involving socially sanctioned wrongdoing toward outgroup members. Findings indicated that, for a large majority, judgments of bad character strongly reduce ascriptions of the good life, while having no impact at all on ascriptions of happiness or well-being. Taken together with earlier findings these results suggest that the lay concept of a good life is clearly distinct from those of happiness, well-being, or morality, likely encompassing both morality and well-being, and perhaps other values as well: whatever matters in a personÕs life. Importantly, morality appears not to play a fundamental role in either happiness or well-being among the folk.

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 determined 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, we investigate whether laypeople use 'reasonable' mainly as descriptive, evaluative, or merely value-associated term, based on supervised machine learning models. We find that 'reasonable' is predicted to be an evaluative term in a majority of cases. This supports prescriptive accounts, and poses potential problems for descriptive and hybrid accounts of the term. Other terms 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 and the understanding lay jurors might bring into the court room.

In two experiments (N=888), we explore to what extent the folk concept of art is compatible with the leading philosophical definitions of art, and whether it is an essentialist or a non-essentialist concept. We manipulate three factors: whether an object is created intentionally, whether it has aesthetic value, and whether it is institutionally recognized. In addition, we also manipulate the artistic domain (visual art or music). The results suggest that none of the three properties is seen by the folk as necessary for an object to be considered art, which suggests that the folk concept of art might be a cluster concept.

Predictability is a prerequisite for effective human control of artificial intelligence (AI). For example, the inability to predict the malfunctioning of AI impedes timely human intervention. In this paper, we employ a computerized navigation task, a lunar lander game, to investigate empirically how AI's predictability compares to humans' predictability. To this end, we ask participants to guess whether the landings of a spaceship in this game performed by AI and humans will succeed. We show that humans are worse at predicting AI performance than at predicting human performance in this environment. Significantly, participants underestimate the differences in the relative predictability of AI and, at times, overestimate their prediction skills. We link the difference in predictability to differences in the approaches, i.e. different landing patterns, employed by AI and humans to succeed in the task. These results highlight important differences in perception of AI and human with implications for human-computer interaction.