{"pk":27814,"title":"Statistical norm effects in casual cognition","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Current causal theories argue that the statistical normality or\nabnormality of an action makes a difference to people’s\ncausal judgements. In this paper, we present two experiments\nthat explore the role of statistical norms in causal cognition.\nIn our first experiment, we provide a preliminary test of two\ncompeting theories that aim to explain the effects of normality\nin causal cognition – the actual causal strength measure (Icard\nKominsky & Knobe, 2017) and the correspondence\nhypothesis about causal judgements (Harinen, 2017). In\naddition, we control for an often neglected factor, the\nepistemic states of agents. Our second experiment\ninvestigates the effect of statistical normality in the same\ncontext, but with a probabilistic rather than deterministic\ncausal structure. Our results favour Icard et al.’s (2017) model\nof causal strength, but show that the statistical normality of an\naction loses its influence when the occurrence of the outcome\nis probabilistic. We discuss the implications of our findings\nfor current causal theories","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Casual judgement"},{"word":"statistical norms"},{"word":"normality"}],"section":"Publication-based-Talks","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7g14d2f6","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Lara","middle_name":"","last_name":"Kirfel","name_suffix":"","institution":"University College London","department":""},{"first_name":"David","middle_name":"","last_name":"Lagnado","name_suffix":"","institution":"University College London","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2018-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/27814/galley/17453/download/"}]}