Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.