The Modal and Metacognitive Nature of Causal Judgment

Abstract

Why did the car accident occur? How do we stop the recent rise in inflation? Which player is responsible for the team winning the game? In daily life, we are constantly presented with a variety of questions such as these about the causes of events. Given its prevalence and importance, we should hope to understand how people make causal judgments. But driven by a longstanding debate in philosophy, the psychology of causal judgment is fragmented between two concepts of causation. Productive concepts follow the intuition that causes interact with their effects through a chain of transmissions of quantities like force and energy. On the other hand, dependence concepts assume that causes make a difference to their effects in that if the cause had been different, the effect would also have been different. In this dissertation, I present six experiments demonstrating that causal judgment has a modal and metacognitive character, and I argue that dependence concepts alone can explain both of these characters. Specifically, in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, I find that people make causal judgments in ways that are consistent with the idea that they do so by imagining alternative possibilities, and they even move their eyes to visually imagine these possibilities. In Chapter 4 and Chapter 5, I find that people qualify their causal judgments by their confidence in these judgments in systematic ways. Throughout these six experiments, these patterns in causal judgments are well-described by a particular dependence concept of causation known as counterfactual sampling models. Moreover, productive concepts of causation are unable to make similar predictions. I conclude by suggesting that people make causal judgments by imagining alternative possibilities and by discussing the implications of this result for psychology and philosophy.