Dear all,
This week at the Applied Statistics Workshop we will be welcoming Tobias Gerstenberg, a
postdoctoral fellow at MIT. He will be presenting work entitled "A Counterfactual
Simulation Model of Causal Judgment." Please find the abstract below and on the
website<http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/applied.stats.workshop-gov3009/ho…me>.
We will meet in CGIS Knafel Room 354 at noon and lunch will be provided. See you all
there!
-Pam
Title: A Counterfactual Simulation Model of Causal Judgment
Abstract: How do we make causal judgments? In this talk, I will present a counterfactual
simulation model (CSM) of causal judgments that unifies different philosophical views on
causation. The CSM predicts that people's causal judgments are influenced by the
extent to which a candidate cause made a difference to i) whether the outcome occurred,
and ii) how it occurred. I will show how whether-causation and how-causation can be
expressed in terms of different counterfactual contrasts defined over the same generative
model of a domain. I will focus on applying the CSM to the domain of intuitive physics,
asking people to make judgments about colliding billiard balls. The CSM accounts for
participants' causal judgments to a high degree of quantitative accuracy. Causal
judgments increased the more certain participants were that a ball was a whether-cause, a
how-cause, as well as sufficient for bringing about the outcome. The CSM postulates that
people make causal judgments by comparing what actually happened with what would have
happened if the candidate cause had been removed from the scene. In direct support of this
claim, I will show eye-tracking data of how people mentally simulate how the
counterfactual world would have unfolded. I will conclude by discussing how the CSM may
help us better understand the mapping between causal events in the world and the words we
use to describe them.