Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Epistemic states, what an agent knows or beliefs, play a crucial role in people's moral evaluations of the agent's actions. Whether and to what extent epistemic states also influence an agent's perceived causal contribution to an outcome remains the subject of debate. In three experiments, we investigate people's causal and counterfactual judgments about ignorant causal agents. We find that agent's epistemic states, the conditions of their ignorance as well as their epistemic actions influence how causal an agent is perceived, but also the kind of counterfactual alternatives people consider. We take these findings to indicate the crucial role of epistemic states in causal cognition and counterfactual models of causation.