ABSTRACT
Research on people’s understanding of causality has focused mainly on science and has not fully examined the effects of views of causality on patterns of reasoning. This paper addresses this gap in the literature by investigating the impact of individuals’ views of causality on their reasoning about social events. We have focused on beliefs about causal agency (i.e., what drives causation in an event). We propose a taxonomy of views of causal agency and their implications for reasoning and decision making. Like Grozter and Perkins (2000), Chi (in press), and Resnick (1996), we are concerned with issues of decentralized causality, but our taxonomy is focused squarely on the social world and is extended to the effects of causal views on patterns of decision making.
