Department of Psychology, Yale University.
Department of Psychology, Northwestern University.
Cogn Sci. 2015 Nov;39(8):1912-24. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12210. Epub 2014 Dec 22.
We investigated how people design interventions to affect the outcomes of causal systems. We propose that the abstract structural properties of a causal system, in addition to people's content and mechanism knowledge, influence decisions about how to intervene. In Experiment 1, participants preferred to intervene at specific locations (immediate causes, root causes) in a causal chain regardless of which content variables occupied those positions. In Experiment 2, participants were more likely to intervene on root causes versus immediate causes when they were presented with a long-term goal versus a short-term goal. These results show that the structural properties of a causal system can guide the design of interventions.
我们研究了人们如何设计干预措施来影响因果系统的结果。我们提出，除了人们的内容和机制知识外，因果系统的抽象结构性质也会影响干预决策。在实验 1 中，参与者倾向于在因果链中的特定位置（直接原因、根本原因）进行干预，而不管哪些内容变量占据了这些位置。在实验 2 中，当参与者面对长期目标而非短期目标时，他们更倾向于干预根本原因而非直接原因。这些结果表明，因果系统的结构性质可以指导干预措施的设计。
