Causal reasoning with continuous outcomes

Ab Rashid, Ahmad and Buehner, Marc J. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4202-7511 2013. Causal reasoning with continuous outcomes. Presented at: CogSci 2013, Berlin, 31 July - 3 August 2013. CogSci 2013 Proceedings. Proceedings of the Thirty-fifth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. pp. 115-120.

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Abstract

We describe an attempt to understand causal reasoning in situations where a binary cause produces a change on a continuous magnitude dimension. We consider established theories of binary probabilistic causal inference – ΔP and Power PC – and adapt them to continuous non-probabilistic outcomes. While ΔP describes causal strength as the difference of effect occurrence between the presence and absence of the cause, Power PC normalizes this difference with the effect base-rate to obtain a proportional measure of causal power, relative to the maximum possible strength. Two experiments compared the applicability of each approach by creating scenarios where binary probabilistic scenarios were directly mapped onto inference problems involving continuous magnitude dimensions. Results from counterfactual judgments tentatively indicate that people reason about causal relations with continuous outcomes by adopting a proportional approach when evaluation preventive causal powers, and a difference approach in generative scenarios. Keywords: causal learning; continuous outcomes; reasoning; counterfactual.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Psychology
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
ISBN:	9780976831891
Related URLs:	http://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2013/index...
Last Modified:	28 Oct 2022 10:04
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/76571

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