Causal Thinking in Judgment under Uncertainty

Many of the decisions we make, in trivial as well as in crucial matters, depend on the apparent likelihood of events such as the keeping of a promise, the success of an enterprise, or the response to an action. In general, we do not have adequate formal models to compute the probabilities of such events. Consequently, most evaluations of likelihood are subjective and intuitive. The manner in which people evaluate evidence to assess probabilities has aroused much research interest in recent years, e.g. Edwards (1968), Slovic (1972), Slovic, Fischhoff, and Lichtenstein (1975), Kahneman and Tversky (1973), and Tversky and Kahneman (1974). This research has identified different heuristics of intuitive thinking and uncovered characteristic errors and biases associated with them. The present paper is concerned with the role of causal thinking in the evaluation of evidence and in the judgment of probability.

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