Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We offer an account of the role of normality—both statisti-cal and prescriptive—in judgments of actual causation. Us-ing only standard tools from the literature on causal cognition,we argue that the phenomenon can be explained simply on theassumption that people stochastically sample (counterfactual)scenarios in a way that reflects normality. We show that a for-malization of this idea, giving rise to a novel measure of causalstrength, can account for some of the most puzzling qualitativepatterns uncovered in recent experimental work