Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Knowledge of cause and effect allows people to navigate and understand the complex systems of the world. Despite the importance of causal knowledge to everyday reasoning, little is known about how people transfer causal knowledge learned in one situation to novel contexts. In two experiments, we examine when people choose to generalize two types of causal knowledge, causal mechanisms (Experiment 1) and causal strength (Experiment 2), across various domains. We find that people willingly transfer causal knowledge to novel contexts when the entities in those contexts share high categorical relatedness with the source of the causal knowledge. The extent to which people are willing to transfer causal knowledge decreases as category similarity decreases. We discuss future research that could delineate the boundaries of causal transfer.