There is broad consensus that features such as causality, mental states, and preventability are key inputs to moral judgments of blame. What is not clear is exactly how people process these inputs to arrive at such judgments. Three studies provide evidence that early judgments of whether or not a norm violation is intentional direct information processing along 1 of 2 tracks: if the violation i...

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.

INTRODUCTION Primary care residencies are expected to provide training in cultural competence. However, we have insufficient information about the perceptions of stakeholders actually involved in healthcare (i.e. residents, faculty and patients) regarding commonly encountered cross-cultural barriers and the skills required to overcome them. METHOD This study used a total of 10 focus groups to...