The Responsibility Account

There is now a great deal of evidence that norm violations impact people’s causal judgments. But it remains contentious how best to explain these findings. This includes that the primary explanations on offer differ with regard to how broad they take the phenomenon to be. In this chapter, I detail how the explanations diverge with respect to the expected scope of the contexts in which the effect arises, the types of judgments at issue, and the range of norms involved. In doing so, I briefly summarize the evidence favoring my preferred explanation—the responsibility account. I then add to the evidence, presenting the results of two preregistered studies that employ a novel method: participants were asked to rank order compound statements combining a causal attribution and a normative attribution