    Story 135
    Comment: The good, the bad, and the timely: how temporal order and moral judgment influence causal selection, (Reuter, et al, 2014), Figure 5, Impact of temporal order on causal judgments in the rule violation condition. Scenario 11 vs. Scenario 12 (82% Zoe vs. <5% Alice). These results are more comparative results because the raw experiment has 5 options: Alice, Zoe, Both, None of the two, Not sure.

    Alice and Zoe work for the same company. They work in different rooms and both of them sometimes need to access the central computer of the company. Unbeknownst to everybody, if two people are logged in to the central computer at the same time, an empty email is immediately sent from the central computer to a non-existent email address. In order to make sure that one person is always available to answer incoming phone calls, the company issued the following official policy: Alice is the only one permitted to log in to the central computer in the mornings, whereas Zoe is the only one permitted to log in to the central computer in the afternoons. One day, violating the official policy, Zoe logs in to the central computer at 9 am. The same day, following the official policy, Alice logs in at 9.30 am, when Zoe is already logged in. Immediately, an empty email is sent from the central computer to a non-existent email address. Did Alice cause an empty email to be sent from the central computer to a non-existent email address?

    Answer: No