Causal conflicts produce domino effects

Abstract

Inconsistent beliefs call for revision—but which of them should individuals revise? A long-standing view is that they should make minimal changes that restore consistency. An alternative view is that their primary task is to explain how the inconsistency arose. Hence, they are likely to violate minimalism in two ways: they should infer more information than is strictly necessary to establish consistency and they should reject more information than is strictly necessary to establish consistency. Previous studies corroborated the first effect: reasoners use causal simulations to build explanations that resolve inconsistencies. Here, we show that the second effect is true too: they use causal simulations to reject more information than is strictly necessary to establish consistency. When they abandon a cause, the effects of the cause topple like dominos: Reasoners tend to deny the occurrence of each subsequent event in the chain. Four studies corroborated this prediction.

Temporal explanations.

“…Consider this description from Khemlani and Johnson-Laird (2013):If a person does regular aerobic exercises then the person strengthens her heart.Someone did regular aerobic exercises, but she [did/did not] strengthen her heart.What, if anything, follows?If the woman strengthened her heart, there is nothing to explain, and reasoners often respond that “nothing follows.” If she did not strengthen her heart, however, the two premises are inconsistent with one another, that is, reasoners can draw contradictory conclusions from them. They often infer explanations to eliminate the conflict, for example,Perhaps she has a health condition that prevents her heart from getting stronger.Since prevention is a causal relation, the explanation is causal in nature, and reasoners rely on causal knowledge to resolve other kinds of inconsistencies, too (Khemlani & Johnson-Laird, 2020). They need not have constructed an explanation: a more conservative response would be to directly refute the premises, for example, reasoners could infer that the first premise is strictly false (it describes a generalization that has exceptions).…”