Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Norm violations have been shown to influence causal judgments. Icard, Kominsky, and Knobe (2017) explained theinfluence of norms by appeal to a model of norm-weighted sampling of counterfactual possibilities. This model explainstwo well-known effects (among others): When two agents must act to bring about an outcome (i.e. both actions arenecessary), if an agent S violates a norm, they are judged more causal than when they do not violate a norm (abnormalinflation), and the other agent B is judged to be less causal than when S does not violate a norm (causal supersession).In the present study (N = 1008), we find empirical support for two untested further predictions of this sampling modelof causal strength judgments: Abnormal inflation of S is greater when B violates a norm (inflation increase), and causalsupersession of B is smaller when S violates a norm (supersession decrease).