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Joshua Knobe, Professor of Philosophy and Psychology and Linguistics, Yale University
Ordinary Judgments of Causation
As researchers, we often make judgments about the causal relations among different variables, but outside the realm of systematic research, people often make more ordinary, intuitive judgments of causation. How exactly do people make these judgments? A growing body of research suggests that people's ordinary causal judgments can be impacted by their prescriptive judgments (i.e., by judgments about how things are actually supposed to be). We develop and test a computational model that explains the impact of prescriptive judgments on causal judgments. The core claims are that (a) people make causal judgments by "sampling" counterfactual possibilities and (b) prescriptive judgments impact the probability that a counterfactual will be sampled.