The present study was designed to explore how learning magnitude knowledge and learning procedural knowledge, with respect to both whole numbers and fractions, might be causally related. Neither magnitude knowledge nor procedural knowledge is necessary or sufficient for learning the other, and yet, correlations between the two are ubiquitous (e.g., Siegler & Pyke, 2013). Using correlational dat...

Day-care centers provide an ideal, underused setting for studying the developmental processes of child psychopathology. The influence of day-care teachers' lax and overreactive discipline on children's behavior problems was examined, as was the influence of children's behavior problems on teachers' discipline. Participants were 145 children and 16 day-care teachers from 8 classrooms in a day-ca...

The current study estimated the causal links between preschool mathematics learning and late elementary school mathematics achievement using variation in treatment assignment to an early mathematics intervention as an instrument for preschool mathematics change. Estimates indicate (n = 410) that a standard deviation of intervention-produced change at age 4 is associated with a 0.24-SD gain in a...

Impulsivity is a multifaceted trait with substantial implications for human well-being. One facet of impulsivity is negative urgency, the tendency to act impulsively in response to negative affect. Correlational evidence suggests that negative affect magnifies impulsive behavior among individuals with greater negative urgency, yet causal evidence for this core pillar of urgency theory is lackin...

W e report a series of studies of historical reasoning among professional observers of world politics. The correlational studies demonstrate that experts with strong theoretical commitments to a covering law and cognitive-stylistic preferences for explanatory closure are more likely to reject close-call counterfactuals that imply that “already explained” historical outcomes could easily have ta...

One of the most fundamental problems in causal inference is the estimation of a causal effect when treatment and outcome are confounded. This is difficult in an observational study, because one has no direct evidence that all confounders have been adjusted for. We introduce a novel approach for estimating causal effects that exploits observational conditional independencies to suggest “weak” pa...

There is increasing evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that visual awareness is not only associated with activity in ventral visual cortex but also with activity in the parietal cortex. However, due to the correlational nature of neuroimaging, it remains unclear whether this parietal activity plays a causal role in awareness. In the experiment presented here we disrupted...

Recent research has posited that retributiveness is an individual level disposition that can help us understand foreign policy preferences (e.g. Liberman 2006, Liberman 2007, Liberman in press, Stein n.d.). However, previous research is limited in two related respects. First, previous research relies on correlational data, blunting our ability to make clear causal inferences. Also, retributiven...

The aim of this study was to analyze academic self-efficacy as a mediator between emotional intelligence and engagement. A non-experimental, cross-sectional, correlational-causal designed in which 1,164 Mexican students participated ( M age = 21.21; SD 3.26) (30.0% female; 69.6% male; 0.4% other). scales intelligence, engagement were used, structural equation analysis with latent variables cond...