Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Causal pluralism proposes that humans can reason about causes and effects in terms of both dependency and process relations, depending on the scenario. Empirical support for this view is provided by responses to double prevention scenarios in which an actor attempts to bring about an outcome, a preventer attempts to prevent the outcome, and a double preventer intervenes to stop the preventer’s prevention attempt. In contrast to the predictions of the causal pluralism account, two pre-registered experiments (Ns = 400 and 450) indicate (a) that intentional actions are judged to be significantly more causative of an outcome than unintentional actions for both the actor and the double preventer and (b) that reasoners interpret the double preventer’s link to the outcome in terms of a process relation. These results underscore the need to revisit fundamental questions regarding how reasoners form and reason over representations of causal scenarios featuring intentional actions.