(Causal) models on the mind: Representing and evaluating competing explanations of the evidence

Despite the increase in studies that investigate the level of complexity in causal explanations that people prefer in laboratory tasks, little is known about their preferences in more applied domains (e.g. the legal system). When participants evaluated competing legal explanations of the same evidence, their preferences for complexity of explanations were affected by: i) whether they were required to graphically represent the competing explanations as visual causal models, and ii) the way they organised information into the actual structure that was drawn. Although previous research has shown that people can reason correctly about causality, these findings are amongst the few that show that generating and drawing causal models directly affects people’s evaluations of explanations.