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The Dissenter

#999 Tobias Gerstenberg: How We Think About Causality and Moral Responsibility

Sep 27, 2024
Dr. Tobias Gerstenberg, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford, delves into the intricacies of causal cognition and moral responsibility. He discusses counterfactual thinking and how we attribute causality, touching on dilemmas like causation by omission versus commission. The conversation explores moral assessments using real-world scenarios, revealing how intentions and outcomes shape our ethical judgments. Gerstenberg's insights merge philosophy with psychology, providing a fascinating look at our cognitive processes and their implications for accountability.
01:24:24

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Quick takeaways

  • Causal cognition involves understanding how individuals discern causality through processes like causal learning, reasoning, and judgment in various contexts.
  • Counterfactual reasoning is crucial for conceptualizing causation, enabling individuals to derive lessons from past experiences and inform future decisions.

Deep dives

Understanding Causal Cognition

Causal cognition encompasses how individuals perceive and interpret causality in the world, spanning several key areas. This includes causal learning, where people acquire knowledge about the causal structures and relationships between variables, as seen in studies of children learning how objects interact, or adults learning in new situations such as games. Causal reasoning builds upon this knowledge by allowing individuals to predict future events and infer past occurrences, as illustrated by detectives piecing together clues at a crime scene. Finally, causal judgment involves assigning explanations to events, determining why something happened amidst the contributing factors, showcasing the complexity of human thought regarding causation.

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