A counterfactual explanation for recency effects in double prevention scenarios: Commentary on Thanawala and Erb...

Many cognitive scientists and philosophers take cases of double prevention to be one of the primary motivations for accepting causal pluralism, the view that people have multiple concepts of causation. Thanawala and Erb (2024) argue against Lombrozo (2010)'s account of causal pluralism. They find that the temporal order of events affects people's causal judgments in double prevention cases, and they argue that this finding is not easily explained by prominent versions of causal pluralism or by counterfactual theories. In contrast to this interpretation, we argue that counterfactual thinking can explain their findings. On this explanation, the temporal order of events affects the extent to which people simulate counterfactual alternatives to these events. We show that under this assumption, a recent counterfactual model of causal judgment can reproduce all qualitative effects of temporal order found in Thanawala and Erb (2024)'s new work. Our findings complement past research that applied the counterfactual framework to temporal-order effects and double prevention cases independently, suggesting that these explanations are highly generalizable.