Motivated causal judgments and responsibility for civilian casualties in military conflicts

Abstract Causal judgments are ubiquitous in politics and crucial for assigning responsibility and blame. Cognitive science has demonstrated that people are more likely to pick factors as “causal” when they make a difference for the outcome across a range of counterfactual scenarios, with the scenarios sampled based on statistical and prescriptive normality. We propose that this makes causal judgments susceptible to motivated reasoning and ingroup favoritism in particular. We hypothesize that people will be less likely to assign causal efficacy and responsibility for counternormative outcomes to groups they support, and that the bias will be greater for more complex causal structures. We test these propositions in two pre‐registered survey experiments run on representative samples in Poland. The context of the experimental vignettes is a military conflict between Russia and Ukraine. We find that, in all scenarios, respondents assign significantly higher causal power and responsibility to the attackers when the attackers are Russian rather than Ukrainian, consistent with our theory and the very high levels of public support for Ukraine in Poland. Contrary to our expectations, the responsibility of the attackers is not significantly lower when they hit a public building as a result of defending combatants moving there rather than when unprovoked.