FriSem

Date
Fri February 24th 2023, 3:15 - 4:30pm
Location
Department of Psychology, Building 420, room 050

Sarah Wu, Department of Psychology, Stanford University (Assistant Professor Tobias Gerstenberg is Sarah's advisor)

Title: A computational framework for responsibility judgments from counterfactual simulations and intention inferences

Abstract: Responsibility attributions are ubiquitous and consequential in our everyday lives. How responsible someone is for an outcome depends on both the causal role of their actions, and what those actions reveal about their moral character. Prior work has successfully modeled people’s causal attributions and mental state inferences using planning algorithms assumed to approximate people’s intuitive theory of mind. In this talk, I present a unified computational framework for responsibility judgments in which the same generative planner can be used to model both of these processes. We tested our framework on a variety of animated social scenarios in two experiments. Experiment 1 featured simple cases of agents helping and hindering. Experiment 2 featured more complex interactions requiring recursive reasoning, including scenarios where one agent affected another by merely signaling their intentions without physically acting on the world. Our model captured participants’ counterfactual simulations and intention inferences, and together these two factors explained responsibility judgments.