Cause and Fault in Development

Preprint: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/e58br_v1

Welcome to the repository for the paper "Cause and Fault in Development". This repository contains the experiments, data, analyses, and figures that support the research.

👥 Authors

• David Rose★†¹
• Cici Hou★²
• Shaun Nichols³
• Tobias Gerstenberg¹
• Ellen M. Markman¹

¹ Department of Psychology, Stanford University
² Department of Computer Science, Stanford University
³ Department of Philosophy, Cornell University

★ joint first authors
† [email protected]

📖 Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Repository Structure
• About the Experiments
• CRediT author statement

💡 Introduction

Responsibility requires causation. But there are different kinds of causes. Some are connected to their effects; others are disconnected. We ask how children's developing ability to distinguish causes relates to their understanding of moral responsibility. We found in Experiment 1 that when Andy hits Suzy with his bike, she falls into a fence and it breaks, 3-year-old children treated "caused", "break" and "fault" as referring to the direct cause, Suzy. By 4, they differentiated causes: Andy "caused" the fence to break, it's his "fault", but Suzy "broke" it. We found in Experiment 2 that when the chain involved disconnection, 3-year-olds focused only on the direct cause. Around 5 they distinguished causes, saying that the disconnecting cause "caused" an object to break, it’s their "fault", but the direct cause "broke" it. Our findings relate to the outcome-to-intention shift in moral responsibility and suggest a more fundamental shift in children's understanding of causation.

📂 Repository Structure

├── appendix
├── code
│   ├── R
│   ├── experiments
│   └── python
├── data
├── docs
└── figures

🔍 Detailed Breakdown

• appendix/: Contains additional information and analyses not included in the paper.

  • appendix.pdf: The appendix document.

• code/: All code for running experiments, analyzing data, and generating figures.

  • experiments/: Experiment-specific code, including pre-registrations available via the Open Science Framework:
    • Experiment 1
      • Fault question first ordering (pre-registration)
      • Fault question last ordering (pre-registration)
    • Experiment 2 (pre-registration)
  • R/: Scripts for data analysis and figure generation. See a rendered file here.

• data/: Contains anonymized datasets for all experiments.

• docs/: Contains a visualization of the analysis script in code/R/.

• figures/: All figures used in the paper, generated using scripts in code/R/.

🔬 About the Experiments

• Experiments involving children were conducted using Lookit.
• Pre-registrations for all experiments are accessible on the Open Science Framework (links provided in the Repository Structure).

🖋️ CRediT author statement

What is a CRediT author statement?

Term	David Rose	Cici Hou	Shaun Nichols	Tobias Gerstenberg	Ellen M. Markman
Conceptualization	X	X	X	X	X
Methodology	X	X	X		X
Software	X	X
Validation	X	X
Formal analysis	X	X
Investigation	X	X
Resources		X
Data Curation		X
Writing – Original Draft	X	X
Writing – Review & Editing	X	X	X	X	X
Visualization	X	X
Supervision	X		X	X	X
Project administration	X		X	X	X
Funding acquisition					X