Does breaking a rule make you 'the cause' even if the rule is irrelevant?
People overwhelmingly blamed the person who broke an unrelated rule as the sole cause of an outcome, and when an outcome was bad and unforeseeable they became more likely to say nobody caused it.
Source
The good, the bad, and the timely: how temporal order and moral judgment influence causal selection
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — 3 × 3 × 2 between-subjects vignette design: timing of two people's logins (together, Alice first, Zoe first) × outcome (neutral, good, bad) × norm (none, Zoe breaks a company rule); each participant read one of 18 scenarios.
- N
- N=2022 · Online MTurk participants; 1283 answered the forced-choice causation question and 739 rated blame/praise. Individual scenario cells ranged roughly from 40 to about 107 people.
- Population
- Adult native English speakers recruited on Amazon Mechanical Turk
- Outcome
- Forced choice of who caused the outcome (Alice, Zoe, both, neither, not sure); blame/praise ratings from -3 to +3
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
Online participants read one short story in which two coworkers, Alice and Zoe, log into a computer, and the double login unexpectedly triggers an email being sent, spam being deleted (good) or customer emails being deleted (bad). The researchers varied whether the two logged in together or one after the other, whether the outcome was neutral, good or bad, and whether Zoe broke a company rule about who may log in in the morning. Participants then picked who caused the outcome, or rated how blameworthy each person was.
What they found
When both logged in together with a neutral outcome and no rule broken, 81.5% said both caused it; when they logged in one after the other, many people picked the later person instead. Making the outcome bad cut 'both' answers to 48.6% and raised 'neither' answers from 11.1% to 43.2%, even though blame ratings did not change. When Zoe broke a rule that had nothing to do with the outcome, 80.4% named her as the sole cause, and a rule violation even overrode timing: 62.7% still chose Zoe when she logged in first.
The limits
What it doesn't show
All data come from brief hypothetical vignettes about a single office scenario, answered online, so real-world causal and legal judgments may differ. The design shows that outcome valence matters for causal judgment but cannot tell why; the authors' 'anti-bad luck' explanation was not directly tested because moral responsibility was not measured. The rule-violation effect could reflect norm violation itself, blame, or an inference that rule-breaking is statistically unusual, and the study cannot separate these.
Key terms
- Causal selection
- Picking out which of several contributing factors people regard as 'the' cause of an outcome.
- Temporal chain
- A causal structure in which independent events happen one after another and jointly produce an effect.
- Norm Violation Account
- The theory that people single out abnormal events, including rule violations, as causes.
- Culpable control model
- The theory that a desire to blame someone leads people to exaggerate that person's causal role, intent or foresight.
- Actual causation
- Judging which specific events really brought about a particular outcome in a particular case.
Flashcards
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Quiz yourself
When Zoe broke an unrelated company rule, most participants said:
Common questions
Why did a bad outcome make people say no one caused it?
The authors suggest people are reluctant to hold anyone responsible for a harmful outcome they could not have foreseen or intended, so they deny that anyone caused it; this idea was not directly tested.
Why is it surprising that Zoe's rule violation mattered?
The rule was about phone cover and had nothing to do with the email outcome, yet breaking it made most people name her as the sole cause.
Why ask 'who caused it?' rather than 'how much did each contribute?'
The authors argue graded contribution questions blur causes with mere background conditions, while a who-question asks for a judgment of actual causation.
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