Abstract
I argue that psychologists interested in human causal judgment should understand and adopt a representation of causal mechanisms by directed graphs that encode conditional independence (screening off) relations. I illustrate the benefits of that representation, now widely used in computer science and increasingly in statistics, by (i) showing that a dispute in psychology between ‘mechanist’ and ‘associationist’ psychological theories of causation rests on a false and confused dichotomy; (ii) showing that a recent, much-cited experiment, purporting to show that human subjects, incorrectly let large causes ‘overshadow’ small causes, misrepresents the most likely, and warranted, causal explanation available to the subjects, in the light of which their responses were normative; (iii) showing how a recent psychological theory (due to P. Cheng) of human judgment of causal power can be considerably generalized: and (iv) suggesting a range of possible experiments comparing human and computer abilities to extract causal information from associations.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Ahn, W. and Bailenson, J. (1996), ‘Causal Attribution as a Search for Underlying Mechanisms: An Explanation of the Conjunction Fallacy and the Discounting Principle’, Cognitive Psychology.
Ahn, W., Kalish, C.W., Medin, D.L. and Gelman, S.A. (1995), ‘The Role of Covariation Versus Mechanism Information in Causal Attribution’, Cognition 54, pp. 299–352.
Allan, L.G. (1980), ‘A Note on Measurements of Contingency Between Two Binary Variables in Judgment Tasks’. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 15, pp. 147–149.
Allan, L.G. and Jenkins, H.M. (1983), ‘The Effect of Representations of Binary Variables on Judgment of Influence’. Learning and Motivation, 14, pp. 381–405.
Anderson, J.R. and Sheu, C-F. (1995), ‘Causal Inferences as Perceptual Judgments’. Memory & Cognition 23, pp. 510–524.
Baker, A.G., Mercier, P., Valle-Tourangeau, F., Frank, R. and Pan, M. (1993), ‘Selective Associations and Causality Judgments: The Presence of a Strong Causal Factor May Reduce Judgments of a Weaker One’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 19, pp. 414–432.
Cheng, P.W. (1997), ‘From Covariation to Causation: A Causal Power Theory’. Psychological Review 104, pp. 367–405.
Cheng, P.W. and Novick, L.R. (1992), ‘Covariation in Natural Causal Induction’. Psychological Review, 99, pp. 365–382.
Glymour, C. and Cheng, P. W. Causal Mechanism and Probability: A Normative Approach’, in M. Oaksford and N. Chater (eds.), Rational Models of Cognition. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press (in press).
Harré, R. and Madden, E.H. (1975), Causal Powers: A Theory of Natural Necessity, Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman & Littlefield.
Hashem, A.I. and Cooper, G.F. (1996), ‘Human Causal Discovery From Observational Data’. Proceedings of the 1996 symposium of the American Medical Information Association.
Jacoby, L., Yonelinas, A. and Jennings, J., (1997), The Relation Between Conscious and Unconscious (Automatic) Influences: A Declaration of Independence, in J. Cohen and J. Schooler (eds.), Scientific Approaches to Consciousness., Mahwah, N.J., Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 13–47.
Jenkins, H. and Ward, W. (1965), ‘Judgment of Contingency Between Responses and Outcomes’. Psychological Monographs 7, pp. 1–17.
Pearl, J. (1988), Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference. San Mateo, California: Morgan Kaufmann.
Pearl, J. (1995), ‘Causal Diagrams for Empirical Research’, Biomtrika 82(4), pp. 669–709.
Price, P.C. and Yates, J.F. (1993), ‘Judgmental Overshadowing: Further Evidence of Cue Interaction in Contingency Judgment’. Memory & Cognition 21, pp. 561–572.
Rescorla, R.A. (1968), ‘Probability of Shock in the Presence and Absence of CS in Fear Conditioning’. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology 66, pp. 1–5.
Shanks, D.R. (1995), ‘Is human learning rational?’ Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 48A, pp. 257–279.
Shultz, T.R. (1982), ‘Rules of Causal Attribution’. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 47,(1).
Spellman, B.A. (1996a), ‘Acting as Intuitive Scientists: Contingency Judgments are Made While Controlling for Alternative Potential Causes’. Psychological Science, 7, pp. 337–342.
Spellman, B.A. (1996b), Conditionalizing causality, in D.R. Shanks, K.J. Holyoak, D.L. Medin (eds.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, vol 34: Causal learning (pp. 167–207). San Diego: Academic Press.
Spirtes, P., Glymour, C. and Scheines, R. (1993), Causation, Prediction and Search, New York: Springer.
Turner, M. (1987), Death is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Waldmann, M.R. and Holyoak, K.J. (1992), ‘Predictive and Diagnostic Learning Within Causal Models: Asymmetries in Cue Competition’. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 121, pp. 222–236.
White, P.A. (1989), ‘A Theory of Causal Processing’, British Journal of Psychology, 80, pp. 431–454.
White, P.A. (1995), ‘Use of Prior Beliefs in the Assignment of Causal Roles: Causal Powers Versus Regularity-based Accounts’. Memory & Cognition, 23, pp. 243–254.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Glymour, C. Learning Causes: Psychological Explanations of Causal Explanation1 . Minds and Machines 8, 39–60 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008234330618
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008234330618