How do people assign responsibility to individuals in a group context? Participants played a repeated trial experimental game with three computer players, in which they counted triangles presented in complex diagrams. Three between-subject conditions differed in how the group outcome was computed from the individual players' answers. After each…

The experience of causation is a pervasive product of the human mind. Moreover, the experience of causing an event alters subjective time: actions are perceived as temporally shifted towards their effects [Haggard, P., Clark, S., & Kalogeras, J. (2002). Voluntary action and conscious awareness. "Nature Neuroscience," 5(4), 382-385]. This temporal…

What are the factors that influence everyday attributions of cause and blame? The current studies focus on sequences of events that lead to adverse outcomes, and examine people's cause and blame ratings for key events in these sequences. Experiment 1 manipulated the intentional status of candidate causes and their location in a causal chain.…

Examined whether infants believe that size of a moving object striking a stationary object will affect how far the stationary object is displaced. Found that the infants did believe the size of the test cylinder affected the length of the test object's displacement and that they used the initial familiarization event to calibrate their predictions…

Three experiments explored the conditions under which inductive inferences about people were made by children and adults. Results indicated that children often predicted that people would behave differently in the future than they did in the past. Younger children limited predictions of consistency to non-psychological events. Older children…