Causal reasoning
Humans can reason about many topics (for example, in social and counterfactual situations and in the experimental sciences) with the aid of causal understanding.
For example, turning the volume knob of a radio (as the cause) increases or decreases the sound intensity (as the effect).
Cause and effect may also be understood probabilistically, via inferential statistics, where the distinction between correlation and causation is important.
In this case, hot weather causes people both to buy ice cream and to go swimming, and the latter increasing the chances of drowning.
In this way, ascertaining cause and effect relations is quite hard and arguably impossible through statistical observation alone.
Statistical studies can alleviate the problem by controlling for variables suspected to be confounders, but it is still possible that an observed correlation is caused by some uncontrolled-for factor.
For example, if determinism is true, it implies that our actions are caused by prior events, which incompatibilists argue is inconsistent with free will.
As a result, incompatibilists fall into two main camps: libertarians (not to be confused with political libertarians), who argue that human actions are not determined by prior causes, and hard determinists, who argue that free will does not exist.
[14][15] In opposition to both libertarians and hard determinists are compatiblists, who argue that the existence of free will is compatible with determinism.
Humans are predisposed to understand cause and effect, making inferences bi-directionally.
Friedrich Nietzsche argued against Aristotelian causality (that cause precedes effect) in The Will To Power.
Research suggests that other animals, such as rats[24] and monkeys,[25] may or may not understand cause and effect.
Animals may use information about cause and effect to improve decision-making and make inferences about past and future events.
[3] Humans use causal cues and their related effects to make decisions and predictions and to understand mechanisms leading to change.
This model of causal representation[30] suggests that causes are represented by a pattern of forces.
Children develop an ability to understand causality and make inferences based on cause and effect at an early age;[19] some research suggests that children as young as eight months can understand cause and effect.
[33] The ability to understand and reason about causality at a young age allows children to develop naïve theories about many topics.
Causality helps children learn about physics, language, concepts and the behavior of others.
Older children and adults continue to develop an understanding of mechanistic fragments.
The students were asked to make judgments about someone else's successes and failures in schoolwork, and whether those outcomes were attributable to innate ability or to expended effort.
Comparisons between Western and Eastern children and adults suggest differences between the cultures in the causality attributable to particular illnesses.
However, all the children and the Eastern adults also attributed some illnesses (and their remedies) to magical causes.
Members of individualist or collectivist cultures may make different attributions of the origins and motivations of movement on a small scale among animated objects, or what would cause movement within a group of animated objects.
[36] Participants from the UK, China and Hong Kong were shown videos of animated fish on a computer screen.
[37] Experimental work with this species suggests that they can understand hidden causes in a way that was previously believed uniquely human.
