School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh.
Psychol Rev. 2024 Oct;131(5):1208-1234. doi: 10.1037/rev0000428. Epub 2023 Jun 8.
Everything that happens has a multitude of causes, but people make causal judgments effortlessly. How do people select one particular cause (e.g., the lightning bolt that set the forest ablaze) out of the set of factors that contributed to the event (the oxygen in the air, the dry weather … )? Cognitive scientists have suggested that people make causal judgments about an event by simulating alternative ways things could have happened. We argue that this counterfactual theory explains many features of human causal intuitions, given two simple assumptions. First, people tend to imagine counterfactual possibilities that are both a priori likely and similar to what actually happened. Second, people judge that a factor C caused effect E if C and E are highly correlated across these counterfactual possibilities. In a reanalysis of existing empirical data, and a set of new experiments, we find that this theory uniquely accounts for people's causal intuitions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
一切发生的事情都有多种原因，但人们能够毫不费力地做出因果判断。人们如何从导致事件的一系列因素（例如，引发森林大火的闪电）中选择一个特定的原因（例如，空气中的氧气、干燥的天气……）？认知科学家提出，人们通过模拟事件可能发生的替代方式来对事件做出因果判断。我们认为，鉴于两个简单的假设，这种反事实理论可以解释人类因果直觉的许多特征。首先，人们倾向于想象既有先验可能性又与实际发生的情况相似的反事实可能性。其次，如果在这些反事实可能性中因素 C 与结果 E 高度相关，人们就会判断因素 C 导致了结果 E。在对现有实证数据的重新分析和一组新的实验中，我们发现该理论独特地解释了人们的因果直觉。（PsycInfo 数据库记录（c）2024 APA，保留所有权利）。
