Unifying inference and selection in singular causal explanation
Published in In process, 2025
Recommended citation: Stephanie Droop, Tadeg Quillien, Neil R. Bramley. (2025). "Unifying inference and selection in singular causal explanation." Pending publication .
Our experimental data suggests that people engage in inference and selection in a way that is partially predicted by existing theories of these processes. At the same time, we also uncover phenomena that are not predicted by our computational framework based on this work. In particular, we find that people prefer to explain an outcome by citing an unobserved event, rather than an observed event, and that preference is stronger than predicted by our model.