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{
    "pk": 26416,
    "title": "The Plausible Impossible: Causal Constraints on Magical Reasoning",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "A common intuition, often captured in fiction, is that some\nimpossible events (e.g., levitating a stone) are “more\nimpossible” than others (e.g., levitating a feather). We\ninvestigated the source of this intuition, hypothesizing that\ngraded notions of impossibility arise from explanatory\nconsiderations logically precluded by the violation at hand but\nstill taken into account. Studies 1-2 involved college\nundergraduates (n = 192), and Study 3 involved preschool-aged\nchildren (n = 32). In Study 1, participants saw pairs of magical\nevents (spells) that violated one of 18 causal principles—six\nphysical, six biological, and six psychological—and were\nasked to indicate which spell would be more difficult to learn.\nBoth spells violated the same causal principle but differed in\ntheir relation to a subsidiary principle. Participants’ judgments\nof spell difficulty honored the subsidiary principle, even when\nparticipants were given the option of judging the two spells\nequally difficult. Study 2 replicated the effects of Study 1 with\nLikert-type ratings, and Study 3 replicated those effects in\nchildren. Taken together, these findings suggest that events that\ndefy causal explanation are interpreted in terms of explanatory\nconsiderations that hold in the absence of such violations.",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "causal inference"
        },
        {
            "word": "explanation"
        },
        {
            "word": "imagination"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Papers",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/109644g6",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Andrew",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Shtulman",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Occidental College",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Caitlin",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Morgan",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Occidental College",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2016-01-01T18:00:00Z",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26416/galley/16052/download/"
        }
    ]
}