Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do people represent causally complex situations? A real-world case was used to investigate whether single-cause explanations are preferred, and to assess whether goals facilitate causal discounting. Participants were asked to think about the causes of Princess Diana's death and were assigned the goal to show that either the driver or the photographers were not responsible. Participants drew a causal diagram depicting their theory, and rated the importance of the causal factors mentioned. In general, people did not seek a unique cause for the event and generated multicausal explanations with no explicit links between causes. Those given the goal to defend one party included fewer causal factors related to the defended party and rated them as less important, but did not over-emphasize the importance of other factors. The results differ from those found in typical attribution tasks.