This was a really interesting read. Intuitively, it seems like this type of reasoning would generalise to many situations and contexts. I can also imagine this to be generalisable to the way children and perhaps even infants think of causal events. Example: Mom never leaves anything close to the edges of the table because she knows me or the cat may easily push it and make it fall. The infant sees a book falling from the edge of the table after mom has accidentally left it very close to the edge and the cat just passed very close to it, unintentionally touching it with the side of its body. I can see how here, even a child might be more likely to attribute the cause of the book falling to mom leaving it close to the edge. In an opposite situation, say that mom never allows the cat to jump on the table; let’s imagine the cat jumps on the table and the book was also close to the edge in this scenario. I can see how the cat jumping on the table is more likely to be indicated as the cause of the event in this scenario. Has this actually been tested in younger children? I was wondering also whether anyone has explored or even considered the fact that this type of thinking may lead to biases…
Some additional questions:
In judging whether x is the cause of y, do people always consider necessity and sufficiency? How might specific features of the variables or of the context impact whether we may only consider the factor of necessity for example?
Has any literature focused on how considering whether X was sufficient or necessary to cause Y, might actually sometimes lead people in error? I’m revering specifically to when there may be hidden causes, maybe correlated to X, that one is not considering, where it would be wrong to only consider X as the cause of Y.
Can we talk more about how supersession and abnormal inflation differ exactly? I might have missed something but to me they seemed to be getting at the same thing (i.e. Both examples of conjunctive cases in which if one of the cases is abnormal it is more likely to be considered the cause?)