Francesca Bonalumi

We present evidence that people rely on counterfactual reasoning when assessing the responsibility of agents who unknowingly produce negative consequences. We show that people spontaneously produce different counterfactuals to identify the various reasons agents might have for remaining ignorant and to determine responsibility, and that this thought process is sensitive to manipulation of salience. We explore the relationship between counterfactual salience and responsibility ascription in three experiments. In Experiment 1, we asked people to spontaneously produce counterfactual alternatives to a vignette they read. We manipulated whether agents who produced harm knew the relevant information beforehand and what the reasons for the possible ignorance were. The epistemic condition participants were presented with influenced the type of counterfactual thoughts they spontaneously produced, which in turn influenced their responsibility rating. Experiments 2 and 3 investigate the causal connection between counterfactual types and responsibility ascription. In particular, we show that guiding people to consider alternative perpetrators' actions leads to a greater tendency to ascribe responsibility than guiding them to consider the victim's actions. On the other hand, guiding people to consider the effect of external factors does not seem to affect people’s judgments of the perpetrator’s responsibility. Together, our results indicate that considering an agent’s alternative epistemic action and its counterfactual consequences has a causal effect on responsibility ascription.

Children encounter collective decisions—which game to play, which path the group takes, whose preference wins—long before the emergence of a robust political cognition. In many of these contexts, majority rule serves as a default solution. We investigate the conditions under which children aged of 5 and 13 are willing to compromise majority rule and their own enfranchisement for material gain, by having them vote to entrust one of two leaders with decision-making authority for the group: one who commits to following the majority's preference, and one who decides unilaterally. Across three experiments, we manipulate the material incentives offered by each leader, the number of rounds for which the winning leader will make decisions, and the narratives leaders use to justify their decision-making behavior. We find that children prefer leaders who follow majority rule, but that their preference shifts toward the unilateral decision-maker when it benefits them materially—though a minority of children do remain with the majoritarian. The preference for the unilateral decision-maker who provides a material incentive is further mitigated when the preference extends across multiple rounds, supporting the notion that majority rule can function as a hedge against uncertainty. Children are also sensitive to narratives that frame unilateral decision-making as protection of a vulnerable minority, though moral justification alone shifts fewer children than material incentives. Together, these findings suggest that children's endorsement of majority rule is a robust but context-sensitive default, modulated by personal incentives, long-term uncertainty, and justificatory narratives.

The sources we rely on are embedded in networks of affiliation and competition, and engaging with them carries epistemic and social costs, yet little is known about how children navigate these demands when they conflict. Across two experiments, 543 children aged 5-15 played a tablet-based quest game in which they joined a team, learned whether their team was winning or losing, and were exposed to contrasting leader traits—competence in Experiment 1, prosociality in Experiment 2. They then made four decisions: which leader to gather information from, whether to ask the other leader as well, utilize the information they gathered, and pick which leader they’d play with in a future game. Children displayed a consistent baseline preference for their own team leader across all dependent variables, but this preference was modulated differently depending on the available trait: when competence was explicit, children disambiguated leader quality from team performance and Team Status had no effect; when only prosociality was available, children used team performance as a proxy for competence, with both factors independently shaping their decisions. A hierarchical Bayesian model pooling both experiments confirmed that older children were more loyal in their choice of information source and future leader preference, yet more likely to deviate when acting on the information they gathered—and when they did, increasingly resolved the conflict by choosing a neutral third option rather than endorsing the opposing leader—suggesting that over development, children do not simply become less biased but more strategic in managing competing epistemic and social goals.

In everyday conversation, messages are often communicated indirectly, implicitly. Why do we seem to communicate so inefficiently? How speakers choose to express a message (modulating confidence, using less explicit formulations) has been proposed to impact how committed they will appear to be to its content. This commitment can be assessed in terms of accountability – is the speaker held accountable for what they communicated? – and deniability – can the speaker plausibly deny they intended to communicate it? We investigated two factors that may influence commitment to implicitly conveyed messages. In a preregistered online study, we tested the hypothesis that the degree of meaning strength (strongly or weakly communicated) and the level of meaning used by the speaker (an enrichment or a conversational implicature) modulate accountability and plausible deniability. Our results show that both meaning strength and level of meaning influence speaker accountability and plausible deniability. Participants perceived enrichments to be harder to deny than conversational implicatures, and strongly implied content as more difficult to deny than weakly implied content. Furthermore, participants held the speaker more accountable to content conveyed via an enrichment than to content conveyed via an implicature. These results corroborate previously found differences between levels of meaning (enrichment vs. implicature). They also highlight the largely understudied role of meaning strength as a cue to speaker commitment in communication.

Understanding when it is acceptable to interrupt a joint activity is an important part of understanding what cooperation entails. Philosophical analyses have suggested that we should release our partner from a joint activity anytime the activity conflicts with fulfilling a moral obligation. To probe young children’s understanding of this aspect, we investigated whether 3-year-old children (N= 60) are sensitive to the legitimacy of motives (selfish condition vs. moral condition) leading agents to intentionally interrupt their joint activity. We measured whether children protested or released their partner by scoring their reactions. Our results indicate that children did not manifest different reactions when the motive behind their partner leaving was moral than when the motive was selfish. However, our data showed a stable pattern: regardless of the partner’s motives, some 3-year-olds take initiatives to release their partners from joint activity, suggesting that measuring release is a valuable tool for investigating joint action.

People routinely ascribe responsibility to others for bad outcomes. Sometimes, they judge that someone is responsible even though this person did not predict that their own choice would have bad consequences for others. The psychological processes for making such judgments, we argue, involve finding a counterfactual in which some minimally benevolent intention initiates a course of events that leads to a better outcome than the actual one. We hypothesize that such counterfactuals can include when relevant, epistemic intentions. With four vignette studies, we show that people consider epistemic intentions when ascribing responsibility for a bad outcome. We further investigate which epistemic intentions people are likely to consider when building counterfactuals for responsibility ascription. We find that, when an agent did not predict the bad outcome, people ascribed responsibility depending on the reasons behind the agents’ lack of knowledge. Agents were judged responsible for the bad outcome when they could have easily known about the consequences of their actions on others, but did not perform the necessary epistemic action; on the other hand, when this information was hard to acquire, people were less willing to ascribe responsibility.

People often deny having meant what the audience understood. Such denials occur in both interpersonal and institutional contexts, such as in political discourse, the interpretation of laws and the perception of lies. In practice, denials have a wide range of possible effects on the audience, such as conversational repair, reinterpretation of the original utterance, moral judgements about the speaker, and rejection of the denial. When are these different reactions triggered? What factors make denials credible? There are surprisingly few experimental studies directly targeting such questions. Here, we present two pre-registered experiments focusing on (i) the speaker’s incentives to mislead their audience, and (ii) the impact of speaker denials on audiences’ moral and epistemic assessments of what has been said. We find that the extent to which speakers are judged responsible for the audience’s interpretations is modulated by their (the speakers’) incentives to mislead, but not by denials themselves. We also find that people are more willing than we expected to revise their interpretation of the speaker’s utterance when they learn that the ascribed meaning is false, regardless of whether the speaker is known to have had incentives to deceive their audience. In general, these findings are consistent with the idea that communicators are held responsible for the cognitive effects they trigger in their audience; rather than being responsible for, more narrowly, only the effects of what was “literally” said. In light of our findings, we present a new, cognitive analysis of how audiences react to denials, drawing in particular on the Relevance Theory approach to communication. We distinguish in particular: (a) the spontaneous and intuitive re-interpretation of the original utterance in light of a denial; (b) the attribution of responsibility to the speaker for the cognitive effects of what is communicated; and (c) the reflective attribution of a particular intention to the speaker, which include argumentative considerations, higher-order deniability, and reputational concerns. Existing experimental work, including our own, aims mostly at (a) and (b), and does not adequately control for (c). Deeper understanding of what can be credibly denied will be hindered unless and until this methodological problem is resolved.

People often deny having meant what the audience understood. Such denials occur in both interpersonal and institutional contexts, such as in political discourse, the interpretation of laws and the perception of lies. In practice, denials have a wide range of possible effects on the audience, such as conversational repair, reinterpretation of the original utterance, moral judgements about the speaker, and rejection of the denial. When are these different reactions triggered? What factors make denials credible? There are surprisingly few experimental studies directly targeting such questions. Here, we present two pre-registered experiments focusing on (i) the speaker’s incentives to mislead their audience, and (ii) the impact of speaker denials on audiences’ moral and epistemic assessments of what has been said. We find that the extent to which speakers are judged responsible for the audience’s interpretations is modulated by their (the speakers’) incentives to mislead, but not by denials themselves. We also find that people are more willing than we expected to revise their interpretation of the speaker’s utterance when they learn that the ascribed meaning is false, regardless of whether the speaker is known to have had incentives to deceive their audience. In general, these findings are consistent with the idea that communicators are held responsible for the cognitive effects they trigger in their audience; rather than being responsible for, more narrowly, only the effects of what was ‘literally’ said. In light of our findings, we present a new, cognitive analysis of how audiences react to denials, drawing in particular on the Relevance Theory approach to communication. We distinguish in particular: (a) the spontaneous and intuitive re-interpretation of the original utterance in light of a denial; (b) the attribution of responsibility to the speaker for the cognitive effects of what is communicated; and (c) the reflective attribution of a particular intention to the speaker, which include argumentative considerations, higher-order deniability and reputational concerns. Existing experimental work, including our own, aims mostly at (a) and (b), and does not adequately control for (c). Deeper understanding of what can be credibly denied will be hindered unless and until this methodological problem is resolved.

In everyday conversation, messages are often communicated indirectly, implicitly. Why do we seem to communicate so inefficiently? How speakers choose to express a message (modulating confidence, using less explicit formulations) has been proposed to impact how committed they will appear to be to its content. This commitment can be assessed in terms of accountability – is the speaker held accountable for what they communicated? – and deniability – can the speaker plausibly deny they intended to communicate it? We investigated two factors that may influence commitment to implicitly conveyed messages. In a preregistered online study, we tested the hypothesis that the degree of meaning strength (strongly or weakly communicated) and the level of meaning used by the speaker (an enrichment or a conversational implicature) modulate accountability and plausible deniability. Our results show that both meaning strength and level of meaning influence speaker accountability and plausible deniability. Participants perceived enrichments to be harder to deny than conversational implicatures, and strongly implied content as more difficult to deny than weakly implied content. Furthermore, participants held the speaker more accountable to content conveyed via an enrichment than to content conveyed via an implicature. These results corroborate previously found differences between levels of meaning (enrichment vs. implicature). They also highlight the largely understudied role of meaning strength as a cue to speaker commitment in communication.