Responsibility Attribution

How do people assign praise and blame? While people are adept at assigning responsibility in simple contexts, the complexity of social contexts presents various challenges. We often face the ‘problem of many hands’, where several agents – with diverse roles, intentions and knowledge – contribute to a joint outcome. We investigate how people assign blame in such situations, showing how they use causal models to make sense of social behaviour and to infer hidden states such as intent and foresight. We also examine how people attribute responsibility when both humans and AI systems combine to cause an adverse outcome.

Counterfactual thinking in medical context

Project Team: Sharon Chung (University College London), Dr Greta Mohr (University College London), Prof. David Lagnado (University College London)

This research examines the role of counterfactual thinking and the factors influencing causal reasoning, blame and responsibility attribution, and decision-making in high-uncertainty contexts like healthcare. Through psychological experiments using clinical case studies, the study investigates how responsibility, blame, and credit are attributed in medical context. Participants will engage in computer-based tasks involving judgments and decisions about everyday medical problems. The project aims to deepen our understanding of these cognitive processes, support the development of counterfactual tools for better medical decision-making, refine psychological models of blame, and inform de-stigmatization campaigns.

Causal responsibility attribution in moral judgment and decision-making

Project Team: Vanessa Cheung (University College London), Prof. David Lagnado (University College London)

This research investigates how people attribute causality and responsibility to agents in moral contexts. In a range of experiments, we explore how factors such as prior information (e.g., information about the agent's character), statistical normality (e.g., how frequently a cause occurs), causal structure, proximity, and intentionality affect how people make causal and moral judgments, with applications to legal judgment and decision-making.