Everything that happens has a multitude of causes, but people make causal judgments effortlessly. How do people select one particular cause (e.g., the lightning bolt that set the forest ablaze) out of the set of factors that contributed to the event (the oxygen in the air, the dry weather … )? Cognitive scientists have suggested that people make causal judgments about an event by simulating alternative ways things could have happened. We argue that this counterfactual theory explains many features of human causal intuitions, given two simple assumptions. First, people tend to imagine counterfactual possibilities that are both a priori likely and similar to what actually happened. Second, people judge that a factor C caused effect E if C and E are highly correlated across these counterfactual possibilities. In a reanalysis of existing empirical data, and a set of new experiments, we find that this theory uniquely accounts for people's causal intuitions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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反事实和因果选择的逻辑。

发生的每一件事都有很多原因，但人们毫不费力地做出因果判断。人们如何从导致事件的一系列因素（空气中的氧气、干燥的天气……）中选择一个特定的原因（例如，点燃森林的闪电）？认知科学家建议人们通过模拟事情可能发生的其他方式来对事件做出因果判断。我们认为，在两个简单的假设下，这种反事实理论可以解释人类因果直觉的许多特征。首先，人们倾向于想象反事实的可能性，这些可能性既先验地可能又与实际发生的事情相似。其次，如果 C 和 E 在这些反事实可能性中高度相关，人们就会判断 C 因素会导致 E 效应。在对现有经验数据和一组新实验的重新分析中，我们发现该理论唯一地解释了人们的因果直觉。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2023 APA，保留所有权利）。