Causal Structure in Conditional Reasoning

Causal reasoning has been shown to underlie many aspects of everyday judgment and decision-making. We explore the role of causal structure in conditional reasoning, hypothesizing that people often interpret conditional statements as assertions about causal structure. We argue that responses on the Wason selection task reflect the selection of evidence expected to maximally reduce uncertainty over candidate causal structures. We present a model in which people’s selections depend on their interpretation of which causal relationship is asserted by a given conditional statement.