CAUSATION, NORM VIOLATION, AND CULPABLE CONTROL

Alicke et al believe that virtually all meaningful human actions are automatically evaluated. These evaluative reactions intrude on the judgments and attributions that people make about their own and others' behavior. So, when people make focal judgments about the components of a human act, such as whether it caused a particular outcome, whether the outcome was foreseen or foreseeable, whether the action was intentional or involuntary, and whether incapacities or situational constraints excuse or mitigate it, they are influenced by their peripheral evaluative reactions to the actor, the actor's behavior, and the outcomes that ensue. They discuss two prominent alternatives to this assumption about the primacy of evaluation, the first fairly implausible in light of the extant data, the second much in favor. They report the results of the studies that they conducted to distinguish between their evaluation perspective and Hitchcock and Knobe's norm-violation view.