Responsibility attribution about mechanical devices by children and adults

Abstract

We investigated the causal responsibility attributions of adults and children to mechanical devices in the framework of the criticality-pivotality model. It establishes that, to assign responsibility, people consider how important a target is to reaching a positive outcome (criticality) and how much the target contributed to the actual outcome (pivotality). We also tested theoretical predictions about relations between the development of counterfactual thinking and assessments of pivotality. In Experiment 1, we replicated previous findings in adults using our task. In Experiment 2, we administered this task and a brief counterfactual reasoning questionnaire to children aged between 8 and 13 years. Results showed that children also considered both criticality and pivotality when they attributed responsibility. However, older children were more sensitive than younger ones to pivotality. Also, we found a positive correlation between children’s pivotality judgements and a measure of counterfactual thinking. Results are discussed regarding the model’s relation to counterfactual thinking.

Keywords:

• Responsibility attribution
• pivotality
• criticality
• development of causation
• counterfactual thinking

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The “order” factor was used as a control in our experiment. Although we had no initial predictions, we analysed the effect of this factor in participants’ prospective and retrospective judgments. A more detailed description of the “order” factor effect can be found at DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.23503548

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Spanish Government, Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (PGC2018-095868-B-I00) and by the Junta de Andalucía -Conserjería de Universidad, Investigación e Innovación - Project (P21_00073).