Causal Inference in the Social and Behavioral Sciences

Abstract

The human propensity to think in causal terms is well known (Young 1978), and the manner in which judgments about causation are made in everyday life has been studied extensively by psychologists (Einhorn and Hogarth 1986; White 1990). No doubt this propensity contributes, for better or worse, to the persistence of causal language in scientific discourse, despite some influential attempts (for example, Russell 1913) to banish such talk to the prescientific era.