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. 

People