A non-mentalistic cause-based heuristic in human social evaluations.

In situations where an agent unintentionally causes harm to a victim, the agent's (harmless) intention typically carries more weight than his/her (harmful) causal role. Therefore, healthy adults typically judge leniently agents responsible for an accident. Using animated cartoons, we show, however, that in the presence of a difficult concurrent task, this result is reversed: the agent's harmless intention is given less weight than her harmful causal role, inducing participants to judge harshly the accidental agent.