Causality and Sense of Agency: A Social-Cognitive Approach with Temporal and Spatial Binding

Over a decade of research evidences that the perceived time and space between two events becomes contracted when we believe there is a causal connection between them. The present thesis investigated how such measures of implicit causal beliefs translate to meaningful, social contexts, inspired by research from the areas of sense of agency and immanent justice reasoning. Specifically, how effective were the popularly employed methods of temporal and spatial binding at reflecting or extrapolating beyond simple stimuli or otherwise explicit reports of causal beliefs. Chapter 1 gives an overview of the literature on causality, the sense of agency, the binding phenomenon, and immanent justice reasoning. Chapter 2 focuses how the emotional valence of our outcomes modulates temporal binding. These experiments were conducted to establish a basic effect that in intentional binding, and by extension, our SoA, could be modulated by social outcomes. Chapter 3 focuses on the extent to which unconnected events could be causally linked due to their moralistic congruency, measured via temporal binding. Chapter 4 investigated causal binding with regards to self- and other-actions. These experiments were conducted to explore whether top-down processes (knowledge of a causal relationship) were sufficient to produce the binding phenomenon. Chapter 5 investigated extent to which explicit self-report measures used within immanent justice reasoning research replicates with spatial binding. Finally, Chapter 6 offers a general discussion of the findings from my research, and implications for future research centred on the use of the binding phenomenon in causal and sense of agency research.