Experimental studies keep giving us more and more evidence against the theory that people have two concepts of causation (dependence vs. production) This is a nice window into how recent work in cognitive science of causal judgment is going beyond previous approaches A thread

EPxphilosopher.bsky.socialSep 26, 2024 2:49pm

There’s a famous theory that people have two different concepts of causation (production vs. dependence) Experimental studies keep providing more and more evidence against this theory Here’s the very latest: osf.io/preprints/ps... (from Tadeg Quillien, @kevingoneill.bsky.social, Paul Henne)

I would love to talk about it sometime!

The psychology of causation is messy. So messy, that many have given up on a unified explanation in favor of Frankenstein-esque mashups of our best theories. We can't definitively say this was a mistake, but our ongoing work shows that dependence concepts get us further than once thought

EPxphilosopher.bsky.socialSep 26, 2024 2:49pm

There’s a famous theory that people have two different concepts of causation (production vs. dependence) Experimental studies keep providing more and more evidence against this theory Here’s the very latest: osf.io/preprints/ps... (from Tadeg Quillien, @kevingoneill.bsky.social, Paul Henne)

thanks for sharing!!

thanks a bunch for sharing, I actually helped co-write this post (the site template only allows one author)! & agreed, this is definitely meant as a way to quickly get your feet wet and point to more thorough resources like Solomon’s post & Paul Bürkner’s paper for follow-up

stuck analyzing weird-looking data from standard psychological scales? check out my tutorial on modeling slider scale data with the ordered Beta distribution! dibsmethodsmeetings.github.io/ordered-beta/

Ordered Beta Regression for Slider Data

In psychology, we often find ourselves running experiments or surveys in which participants are asked to respond on a numerical scale. For example, we’re probably all familiar with pain scales like th...

"The university has an obligation to interrogate the proposition that a world in which AI is widely used is desirable or inevitable. We don’t need to cheer for a vision of tomorrow in which scientists feel comfortable with not personally reading the articles …” uniavisen.dk/en/cut-the-a...

Cut the 'AI' bullshit, UCPH — University Post

Why do we keep believing that AI will solve the climate crisis, get rid of poverty, and unleash the full potential of human creativity?

P.S. if you can't access APA, the open preprint is available here: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

This project was an absolute blast to think about & work on, and I thank my wonderful collaborators for helping me to see it through! Looking forward to forming new connections between metacognition & causal cognition in the future 🎉

Finally, we found that confidence can tell us a lot more about mechanisms of causal judgment than just the judgments alone. Even though most models made good predictions of causal judgments, only one stood out in predicting confidence. So, future work should definitely leverage this