 Like the trade-off model, according to the deliberation model (Alfano, Beebe, &amp; Robinson 2012; Robinson, Stey, &amp; Alfano 2013; Scaife &amp; Webber 2013), the best explanation of the complex patterns of evidence is that the very first mental stage, the formation of a mental model of the scenario, differs between norm-violation and norm-conformity vignettes. When the protagonist is told that a policy he would ordinarily want to pursue violates a norm, he acquires a reason to deliberate further about what to do; in contrast, when the protagonist is told that the policy conforms to some norm, he acquires no such reason. Participants tend to think of the protagonist as deliberating about what to do when and only when a norm would be violated. Since deliberation leads to the formation of other mental states such as beliefs, desires, and intentions, this basal difference between participants’ models of what happens in the story flows through the rest of their interpretation and leads to the attribution asymmetry. On the deliberation model, then, the attribution asymmetry originates earlier than other experimental philosophers suppose, and is due to rational processes.