Causation and the Silly Norm Effect

S. Magen & K. Prochownik (Eds.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Law (Forthcoming)

36 Pages Posted: 28 Mar 2022 Last revised: 7 Feb 2023

See all articles by Levin Güver

Levin Güver

University College London, Faculty of Law

Markus Kneer

University of Zurich - Institute of Philosophy

Date Written: February 22, 2022

Abstract

In many spheres, the law takes the legal concept of causation to correspond to the folk concept (the correspondence assumption). Courts, including the US Supreme Court, tend to insist on the "common understanding" and that which is "natural to say" (Burrage v. United States) when it comes to expressions relating to causation, and frequently refuse to clarify the expression to juries. As recent work in psychology and experimental philosophy has uncovered, lay attributions of causation are susceptible to a great number of unexpected factors, some of which seem rather peripheral to causation. One of those is the norm effect (Knobe & Fraser, 2008): Agents who, in acting as they do, break a salient norm, are more likely to be considered as having caused a certain consequence than when they do not violate a norm. According to some (e.g., Alicke, 1992) this constitutes a bias. According to others (e.g., Sytsma, 2020), the folk concept of causation is sensitive to normative factors, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In this paper, we explore the question whether the norm effect should be considered a bias from the legal perspective on the one hand, and from the psychological perspective on the other. To do this, we test whether norms which are nonpertinent to the consequences or outright silly also impact causation judgements. The data from two preregistered experiments (total N=593) clearly show they do. This, we argue, makes the bias interpretation plausible from the psychological perspective, and both plausible and problematic from the legal perspective. It also shows that the law should abstain from unreflectively assuming conceptual correspondence between legal and ordinary language concepts.

Keywords: Causation, law, norms, bias, foreseeability, blame

Suggested Citation

Güver, Levin and Kneer, Markus, Causation and the Silly Norm Effect (February 22, 2022). S. Magen & K. Prochownik (Eds.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Law (Forthcoming), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4047203

Levin Güver (Contact Author)

University College London, Faculty of Law

Endsleigh Gardens
London, WC1H 0EG
United Kingdom

Markus Kneer

University of Zurich - Institute of Philosophy ( email )

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
87
Abstract Views
563
Rank
523,966
PlumX Metrics