Jove
Visualize
Contact Us
JoVE
x logofacebook logolinkedin logoyoutube logo
ABOUT JoVE
OverviewLeadershipBlogJoVE Help Center
AUTHORS
Publishing ProcessEditorial BoardScope & PoliciesPeer ReviewFAQSubmit
LIBRARIANS
TestimonialsSubscriptionsAccessResourcesLibrary Advisory BoardFAQ
RESEARCH
JoVE JournalMethods CollectionsJoVE Encyclopedia of ExperimentsArchive
EDUCATION
JoVE CoreJoVE BusinessJoVE Science EducationJoVE Lab ManualFaculty Resource CenterFaculty Site
Terms & Conditions of Use
Privacy Policy
Policies

Related Experiment Videos

Assessing interactive causal influence.

Laura R Novick1, Patricia W Cheng

  • 1Department of Psychology and Human Development, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 90095-1563, USA. laura.novick@vanderbilt.edu

Psychological Review
|April 7, 2004
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Related Concept Videos

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by
Same author

A megastudy of behavioral interventions to catalyze public, political, and financial climate advocacy.

PNAS nexus·2026
Same author

The effect of lexical semantic activation on reasoning about evolution: A cross-linguistic study.

Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006)·2024
Same author

Seeing what you believe: recognition memory for evolutionary tree structure is affected by students' misconceptions.

Memory (Hove, England)·2024
Same author

Promoting climate actions: A cognitive-constraints approach.

Cognitive psychology·2023
Same author

How do humans want causes to combine their effects? The role of analytically-defined causal invariance for generalizable causal knowledge.

Cognition·2022
Same author

Perceptual grouping affects students' propensity to make inferences consistent with their misconceptions.

Journal of experimental psychology. Applied·2022
Same journal

Perception and action as one: Re-integrating research on human action through event files.

Psychological review·2026
Same journal

Associative learning explains "intuitive statistics" in animals.

Psychological review·2026
Same journal

A reciprocal model of practice and skill: Navigating between dropout and expertise.

Psychological review·2026
Same journal

The relative psychometric function: A general analysis framework for relating psychological processes.

Psychological review·2026
Same journal

A taxonomy of discriminatory behavior.

Psychological review·2026
Same journal

Extreme-value signal detection theory for recognition memory: The parametric road not taken.

Psychological review·2026
See all related articles

Covariational theories fail to fully explain conjunctive causation. A new causal-power theory, supported by empirical evidence, better explains how observable events relate to unobservable causal strength.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Causal Inference
  • Philosophy of Science

Background:

  • Conjunctive causation, where multiple factors combine to produce an effect, has been primarily explained by covariational theories.
  • Covariational theories posit that observable event variations directly imply causal relationships, without inferring unobservable causal mechanisms.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To identify limitations in purely covariational theories for explaining conjunctive causation.
  • To propose and provide empirical support for a novel causal-power theory of conjunctive causation.
  • To establish conditions under which covariation indicates conjunctive causation and relate observable events to unobservable causal strength.

Main Methods:

  • Theoretical analysis of covariational and causal-power models.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Empirical investigation to test predictions derived from the proposed causal-power theory.
  • Focus on simple cases with two binary candidate causes and one binary effect.

    • Main Results:

    • The proposed causal-power theory successfully derives conditions for covariation implying conjunctive causation.
    • The theory establishes functions linking observable events to unobservable conjunctive causal strength.
    • Empirical evidence was found to favor the new causal-power theory over purely covariational approaches.

    Conclusions:

    • The causal-power theory offers a more robust explanation for conjunctive causation than covariational theories.
    • This psychological theory advances understanding of causal inference with categorical data.
    • The findings prompt reevaluation of normative statistics for testing causal hypotheses with discrete variables.