---
title: "Causality"
chunk: 7/12
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:43:20.686725+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Psychologists take an empirical approach to causality, investigating how people and non-human animals detect or infer causation from sensory information, prior experience and innate knowledge.
Attribution:
Attribution theory is the theory concerning how people explain individual occurrences of causation. Attribution can be external (assigning causality to an outside agent or force—claiming that some outside thing motivated the event) or internal (assigning causality to factors within the person—taking personal responsibility or accountability for one's actions and claiming that the person was directly responsible for the event). Taking causation one step further, the type of attribution a person provides influences their future behavior.
The intention behind the cause or the effect can be covered by the subject of action. See also accident; blame; intent; and responsibility.

Causal powers
Whereas David Hume argued that causes are inferred from non-causal observations, Immanuel Kant claimed that people have innate assumptions about causes. Within psychology, Patricia Cheng attempted to reconcile the Humean and Kantian views. According to her power PC theory, people filter observations of events through an intuition that causes have the power to generate (or prevent) their effects, thereby inferring specific cause-effect relations.

Causation and salience
Our view of causation depends on what we consider to be the relevant events. Another way to view the statement, "Lightning causes thunder" is to see both lightning and thunder as two perceptions of the same event, viz., an electric discharge that we perceive first visually and then aurally.

Naming and causality
David Sobel and Alison Gopnik from the Psychology Department of UC Berkeley designed a device known as the blicket detector which would turn on when an object was placed on it. Their research suggests that "even young children will easily and swiftly learn about a new causal power of an object and spontaneously use that information in classifying and naming the object."

Perception of launching events
Some researchers such as Anjan Chatterjee at the University of Pennsylvania and Jonathan Fugelsang at the University of Waterloo are using neuroscience techniques to investigate the neural and psychological underpinnings of causal launching events in which one object causes another object to move. Both temporal and spatial factors can be manipulated.
See Causal Reasoning (Psychology) for more information.

==== Statistics and economics ====

Statistics and economics usually employ pre-existing data or experimental data to infer causality by regression methods. The body of statistical techniques involves substantial use of regression analysis. Typically a linear relationship such as

  
    
      
        
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