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.
Professor at George Washington University
I am a Professor with Human-Technology Collaboration and Educational Technology programs at George Washington University in Washington DC. I have written 12 books and more than 100 articles, and I co-host of the Parsing Science podcast where scientists tell the stories behind their research. I am also the developer of the WeShareScience.com online platform for sharing research videos, and SciencePods.com where researchers can create free podcasts about their science. My research interests include human interactions with intelligent machines, needs, needs assessments, and instructional design.
Latest posts by Ryan Watkins (see all)
- Observing many students using difference-in-differences designs on the same data and hypothesis reveals a universe of uncertainty - June 8, 2025
- Limitations of the LLM-as-a-Judge Approach for Evaluating LLM Outputs in Expert Knowledge Tasks - June 7, 2025
- Neural and Cognitive Impacts of AI: The Influence of Task Subjectivity on Human-LLM Collaboration - June 5, 2025