We consider an approach to blame attribution based on counterfactual reasoning in probabilistic generative models. In this view, people intervene on each variable within their model and assign blame in proportion to how much a change to a variable would have improved the outcome. This approach raises two questions: First, what structure do people use to represent a given situation? Second, how ...

Blame is an vital social and cognitive mechanism that humans utilize in their interactions with other agents. In this paper, we discuss how blame-reasoning mechanisms are needed to enable future social robots to: (1) appropriately adapt behavior in the context of repeated and/or long-term interactions and relationships with other social agents; (2) avoid behaviors that are perceived to be rude ...

Although anti-terrorism policy should be based on a normative treatment of risk that incorporates likelihoods of attack, policy makers’ anti-terror decisions may be influenced by the blame they expect from failing to prevent attacks. We show that people’s anti-terror budget priorities before a perceived attack and blame judgments after a perceived attack are associated with the attack’s severit...

Many objectives can be achieved (or may be achieved more effectively) only by a group of agents executing a team plan. If a team plan fails, it is often of interest to determine what caused the failure, the degree of responsibility of each agent for the failure, and the degree of blame attached to each agent. We show how team plans can be represented in terms of structural equations, and then a...

The literature on self-blame and depression reveals two interrelated problems. First, although R. Janoff-Bulman's (1979) conceptualizations of self-blame are clear, empirical operationalization is difficult and has resulted in approaches that do not capture the richness of the constructs. Second, past research has produced inconsistent findings. A comprehensive literature review revealed that t...

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Localizing type errors is challenging in languages with global type inference, as the type checker must make assumptions about what the programmer intended to do. We introduce N���, a data-driven approach to error localization based on supervised learning. N��� analyzes a large corpus of training data — pairs of ill-typed programs and their “�xed” versions — to automatically learn a model of wh...

Observations intended to be made at the Annual General Meeting of the NAMH about the Association and its role as catalyst and 'watch-2?g' of the Mental Health Service b y Veronica Ryan, a member who nas experience of the Service in three separate capacities.

Why do victims sometimes receive sympathy for their suffering and at other times scorn and blame? Here we show a powerful role for moral values in attitudes toward victims. We measured moral values associated with unconditionally prohibiting harm (“individualizing values”) versus moral values associated with prohibiting behavior that destabilizes groups and relationships (“binding values”: loya...

The purpose of this research is to test whether descriptive norms, or cognitions about typical beliefs, values, and behaviors of one’s group, can explain cultural influence in the domains of blame attribution and harm perception. In Study 1, using participants from the United States and South Korea, the authors find that individuals with lower (vs. higher) collectivistic descriptive norms ascri...