On Similarities between Causal Judgments in Experienced and Described Situations

Abstract

Wasserman (1990a) has reported an experiment that shows that people's attributions of causality in circumstances where they have to make inferences from brief verbal descriptions correspond to the attributions they make in situations where they actually experience causal sequences, and on the basis of that result he has suggested that psychologists should search for general laws of learning that might account for correspondences such as this one. I briefly describe some further similarities that can be obtained between causal judgments in experienced and described situations. However, the suggestion that a common mechanism may be involved in the two cases is questioned. Instead, I suggest that the correspondence is little more than a coincidence: It does not arise from the operation of a common mechanism. Instead, I argue that people, along with other organisms, possess an associative learning mechanism that operates in experienced situations, but we also possess domain-specific causal beliefs and metabeliefs about causation. These latter two types of beliefs play little role in experienced causal situations, but can readily be applied in making causal attributions from descriptions.