Quotes About Causality

Every thought is a cause, and every condition is an effect.

Every thought is a cause & every condition is an effect. Change your thoughts & you change your destiny.

our mind is strongly biased toward causal explanations and does not deal well with "mere statistics.

We are pattern seekers, believers in a coherent world, in which regularities (such as a sequence of six girls) appear not by accident but as a result of mechanical causality or of someone's intention.

Many facts of the world are due to chance, including accidents of sampling. Causal explanations of chance events are inevitably wrong.

The prominence of causal intuitions is a recurrent theme in this book because people are prone to apply causal thinking inappropriately, to situations that require statistical reasoning. Statistical thinking derives conclusions about individual cases from properties of categories and ensembles. Unfortunately, System 1 does not have the capability for this mode of reasoning; System 2 can learn to think statistically, but few people receive the necessary training.

Experiments have shown that six-month-old infants see the sequence of events as a cause-effect scenario, and they indicate surprise when the sequence is altered. We are evidently ready from birth to have impressions of causality, which do not depend on reasoning about patterns of causation.

The ultimate test of an explanation is whether it would have made the event predictable in advance.

Statistical results with a causal interpretation have a stronger effect on our thinking than non-causal information. But even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience.

our mind is strongly biased toward causal explanations and does not deal well with "mere statistics." When our attention is called to an event, associative memory will look for its cause—more precisely, activation will automatically spread to any cause that is already stored in memory.

Michotte had a different idea: he argued that we see causality, just as directly as we see color.

Statistics produce many observations that appear to beg for causal explanations but do not lend themselves to such explanations. Many facts of the world are due to chance, including accidents of sampling. Causal explanations of chance events are inevitably wrong.

Statistics produce many observations that appear to beg for causal explanations but do not lend themselves to such explanations.

The hot hand is entirely in the eye of the beholders, who are consistently too quick to perceive order and causality in randomness.

Both in explaining the past and in predicting the future, we focus on the causal role of skill and neglect the role of luck. We are therefore prone to an illusion of control.

even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience.

even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience. On the other hand, surprising individual cases have a powerful impact and are a more effective tool for teaching psychology because the incongruity must be resolved and embedded in a causal story.

If the second object starts moving instantly, they describe it as having been "launched" by the first. Experiments have shown that six-month-old infants see the sequence of events as a cause-effect scenario, and they indicate surprise when the sequence is altered. We are evidently ready from birth to have impressions of causality, which do not depend on reasoning about patterns of causation. They are products of System 1.

The invisibility of noise is a direct consequence of causal thinking.

Relying on causal thinking about a single case is a source of predictable errors. Taking the statistical view, which we will also call the outside view, is a way to avoid these errors.

the preference for causal thinking also contributes to the neglect of noise as a source of error, because noise is a fundamentally statistical notion.

Our predilection for causal thinking exposes us to serious mistakes in evaluating the randomness of truly random events.

counties are different from other counties for a reason, that there must be a cause that explains this difference. As we shall see, however

psychologist Paul Bloom, writing in The Atlantic in 2005, presented the provocative claim that our inborn readiness to separate physical and intentional causality explains the near universality of religious beliefs.