Causal knowledge plays a crucial role in human thought, but the nature of causal
representation and inference remains a puzzle. Can human causal inference be captured by …

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 …

How do people make causal judgements? In this paper, I show that counterfactual
simulations are necessary for explaining causal judgements about events, and that …

A current debate in psychology and cognitive science concerns the nature of young
children's ability to attribute and track others' beliefs. Beliefs can be attributed in at least two …

Counterfactual reasoning—envisioning hypothetical scenarios, or possible worlds, where
some circumstances are different from what (f) actually occurred (counter-to-fact)—is …

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 …

Research on causal cognition has largely focused on learning and reasoning about
contingency data aggregated across discrete observations or experiments. However, this …

When people want to identify the causes of an event, assign credit or blame, or learn from
their mistakes, they often reflect on how things could have gone differently. In this kind of …

When do people say that an event that did not happen was a cause? We extend the
counterfactual simulation model (CSM) of causal judgment (Gerstenberg, Goodman …

Counterfactuals can offer valuable insights by answering what would have been observed
under altered circumstances, conditional on a factual observation. Whereas the classical …