Browsing by Author "Henne, Paul"

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    Confidence and gradation in causal judgment.
    (Cognition, 2022-06) O'Neill, Kevin; Henne, Paul; Bello, Paul; Pearson, John; De Brigard, Felipe
    When comparing the roles of the lightning strike and the dry climate in causing the forest fire, one might think that the lightning strike is more of a cause than the dry climate, or one might think that the lightning strike completely caused the fire while the dry conditions did not cause it at all. Psychologists and philosophers have long debated whether such causal judgments are graded; that is, whether people treat some causes as stronger than others. To address this debate, we first reanalyzed data from four recent studies. We found that causal judgments were actually multimodal: although most causal judgments made on a continuous scale were categorical, there was also some gradation. We then tested two competing explanations for this gradation: the confidence explanation, which states that people make graded causal judgments because they have varying degrees of belief in causal relations, and the strength explanation, which states that people make graded causal judgments because they believe that causation itself is graded. Experiment 1 tested the confidence explanation and showed that gradation in causal judgments was indeed moderated by confidence: people tended to make graded causal judgments when they were unconfident, but they tended to make more categorical causal judgments when they were confident. Experiment 2 tested the causal strength explanation and showed that although confidence still explained variation in causal judgments, it did not explain away the effects of normality, causal structure, or the number of candidate causes. Overall, we found that causal judgments were multimodal and that people make graded judgments both when they think a cause is weak and when they are uncertain about its causal role.
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    Double Prevention, Causal Judgments, and Counterfactuals.
    (Cognitive science, 2022-05) Henne, Paul; O'Neill, Kevin
    Mike accidentally knocked against a bottle. Seeing that the bottle was about to fall, Jack was just about to catch it when Peter accidentally knocked against him, making Jack unable to catch it. Jack did not grab the bottle, and it fell to the ground and spilled. In double-prevention cases like these, philosophers and nonphilosophers alike tend to judge that Mike knocking into the bottle caused the beer to spill and that Peter knocking into Jack did not cause the beer to spill. This difference in causal judgment is a difficult puzzle for counterfactual theories of causal judgment; if each event had not happened, the outcome would not have, yet there is a difference in people's causal judgments. In four experiments and three supplemental experiments, we confirm this difference in causal judgments. We also show that differences in people's counterfactual thinking can explain this difference in their causal judgments and that recent counterfactual models of causal judgment can account for these patterns. We discuss these results in relation to work on counterfactual thinking and causal modeling.
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    Measuring and Modeling Confidence in Human Causal Judgment
    (2021-10-25) O'Neill, Kevin; Henne, Paul; Pearson, John; De Brigard, Felipe

    The human capacity for causal judgment has long been thought to depend on an ability to consider counterfactual alternatives: the lightning strike caused the forest fire because had it not struck, the forest fire would not have ensued. To accommodate psychological effects on causal judgment, a range of recent accounts of causal judgment have proposed that people probabilistically sample counterfactual alternatives from which they compute a graded index of causal strength. While such models have had success in describing the influence of probability on causal judgments, among other effects, we show that these models make further untested predictions: probability should also influence people's metacognitive confidence in their causal judgments. In a large (N=3020) sample of participants in a causal judgment task, we found evidence that normality indeed influences people's confidence in their causal judgments and that these influences were predicted by a counterfactual sampling model. We take this result as supporting evidence for existing Bayesian accounts of causal judgment.

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    OMISSIONS, CAUSATION, AND MODALITY
    (2019) Henne, Paul

    In The Neverending Story (1984), “the nothing” was spreading throughout Fantasia. This is terrifying not just because of the nature of the west-German fantasy film but also because nothing—non-being—was represented as something that existed. Nothing can’t be—or so it seems. In this dissertation, I ask: what do ordinary statements about omissions and absences mean if they are not about things that exist? And then I ask: how can an answer to this question help us understand omissive causation? I present various normative accounts of omissive language and omissive causal models. I end by considering some reasons to doubt such models.