How do people attribute responsibility in situations where the contributions of multiple agents combine to produce a joint outcome? The prevalence of over-determination in such cases makes this a difficult problem for counterfactual theories of causal responsibility. In this article, we explore a general framework for assigning responsibility in…

Attributions of responsibility play a critical role in many group interactions. This paper explores the role of causal and counterfactual reasoning in blame attributions in groups. We develop a general framework that builds on the notion of pivotality: an agent is pivotal if she could have changed the group outcome by acting differently. In three…

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…