Causes versus enabling conditions

doi:10.1016/0010-0277(91)90047-8

Cognition

Volume 40, Issues 1–2, August 1991, Pages 83-120

https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(91)90047-8 Get rights and content

Abstract

People distinguish between a cause (e.g., a malfunctioning component in an airplane causing it to crash) and a condition (e.g., gravity) that merely enables the cause to yield its effect. This distinction cannot be explained by accounts of reasoning formulated purely in terms of necessity and sufficiency, because causes and enabling conditions hold the same logical relationship to the effect in those terms. Proposals to account for this apparent deviation from accounts based on necessity and sufficiency may be classified into three types. One approach explains the distinction in terms of an inferential rule based on the normality of the potential causal factors. Another approach explains the distinction in terms of the conversational principle of being informative to the inquirer given assumptions about his or her state of knowledge. The present paper evaluates variants of these two approaches, and presents our probabilistic contrast model, which takes a third approach. This approach explains the distinction between causes and enabling conditions by the covariation between potential causes and the effect in question over a focal set - a set of events implied by the context. Covariation is defined probabilistically, with necessity and sufficiency as extreme cases of the components defining contrasts. We report two experiments testing our model against variants of the normality and conversational views.

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Citation Excerpt :
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^☆: The research reported in this paper was supported by Grant BNS87-10305 from the National Science Foundation to Cheng. The preparation of this manuscript was supported by the above NSF grant, a National Institute of Mental Health Individual Postdoctoral Fellowship to Novick, and the dean's office of Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. We are grateful to Rochel Gelman, Denis Hilton, Keith Holyoak, Michael Waldmann and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on an earlier draft. This paper was presented in part at the 29th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Chicago, November 1988. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Patricia Cheng.

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Causes versus enabling conditions☆

Abstract

Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive Psychology

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

The role of familiarity in children's explanations of physical causality

Child Development

The development of causal reasoning

Illusory correlations as an obstacle to the use of valid psychodiagnostic signs

Journal of Abnormal Psychology

Where is the bias in causal attribution?

A probabilistic contrast model of causal induction

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Judging probable cause

Psychological Bulletin

Cues: Their relative effectiveness as reinforcers

Science

Sensory quality and integration: Constraints on conditioning

Logic and conversation

Causation in the law

Social inference

Annual Review of Psychology

Explaining differences and weighting causes

Theoria

The problem of causal selection

Conversational processes and causal explanation

Psychological Bulletin

Knowledge-based causal attribution: The abnormal conditions focus model

Psychological Review

Norm theory: Comparing reality to its alternatives

Psychological Review