THE BIAS TOWARD CAUSE AND EFFECT

There is little doubt that causal reasoning plays a vital role in human cognition. Indeed, it is difficult to see how we could make sense of almost any aspect of the physical or social world without an appreciation of cause and effect. For example, a causal interpretation of the world affords the ability to both make sense of previous events and, in turn, make predictions about future ones – two processes that are clearly valuable to the survival of any organism. As such, causal reasoning has been a major topic of inquiry within philosophy and psychology, encompassing broad questions about the nature of our causal representations, the application and scope of causal reasoning, and the origins of this ability. Philosophical theories of causality have typically addressed the topic directly — asking metaphysical questions about how (or whether) this property actually exists. Though for centuries philosophers intuitively knew the importance of cause and effect, it was typically assumed that causal relations themselves were readily apparent in the environment and all one had to do was simply observ