Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Causal selection is the process whereby people decide which of several events responsible for a realized outcome should be considered as “the cause” of that outcome. A theory of causal selection requires a definition of the relevant candidates to be considered for selection. So far, the psychological literature has operated on the implicit premise that the only relevant candidates for causal selection are individual variables, corresponding to the distinct nodes of a causal network. Instead, we argue that causal judgment can recognize plural causes, featuring more than one variable. We provide evidence for the psychological relevance of plural causes by showing: (a) that plural cause judgments are influenced by the same factors that have been proven to influence causal selection judgments in general; (b) that this influence cannot be explained away by assuming that participants estimate the strength of plural cause simply by combining the strength of its individual constituents.