Humans often represent and reason about unrealized possible actions–the vast infinity of
things that were not (or have not yet been) chosen. This capacity is central to the most …

Human commonsense understanding of the physical and social world is organized around
intuitive theories. These theories support making causal and moral judgments. When …

Everything that happens has a multitude of causes, but people make causal judgments
effortlessly. How do people select one particular cause (eg, the lightning bolt that set the …

People tend to judge more recent events, relative to earlier ones, as the cause of some
particular outcome. For instance, people are more inclined to judge that the last basket …

When several causes contributed to an outcome, people often single out one as “the” cause.
What explains this selection? Previous work has argued that people select abnormal events …

People's causal judgments are susceptible to the action effect, whereby they judge actions
to be more causal than inactions. We offer a new explanation for this effect, the …

Causal judgments are widely known to be sensitive to violations of both prescriptive norms
(eg, immoral events) and statistical norms (eg, improbable events). There is ongoing …

Cognitive scientists have been debating how the folk concept of intentional action works. We
suggest a simple account: people consider that an agent did X intentionally to the extent that …

People more frequently select norm‐violating factors, relative to norm‐conforming ones, as
the cause of some outcome. Until recently, this abnormal‐selection effect has been studied …

When judging what caused an event, people do not treat all factors equally–for instance,
they will say that a forest fire was caused by a lit match, and not mention the oxygen in the …