Does Conscious Perception Render Agents More Responsible? A Study of Lay Judgments

Theoretical debates have raged around whether conscious perception is necessary for responsibility. It is still unclear, however, what lay people think, and lay views can be important to legal and sociopolitical decision-making. To explore this issue, the current work conducted three online, vignette-based studies to test how lay third-party responsibility judgments varied with what agents unconsciously and consciously visually perceived when deciding how to act. The findings showed that, for both good and bad outcomes, people judge conscious perception not to be necessary for responsibility: an agent was still judged to be at least partially responsible without having consciously perceived pertinent information about how to act appropriately. However, conscious perception did modulate judgments about degrees of responsibility: insofar as the information was perceptually available and accurate, the agent was judged to be more responsible for the outcome when they had consciously perceived pertinent information compared to when they only unconsciously perceived it. For bad outcomes, this effect was mediated by judgments about whether the agent should and could have consciously perceived pertinent information. These findings are interpreted within current theories of consciousness and responsibility and provide insights into how the public may judge someone as responsible for real-world successes and wrongdoing.