Causal theory error in college students’ understanding of science studies

When reasoning about science studies, people often make causal theory errors by inferring or accepting a causal claim based on correlational evidence. While humans naturally think in terms of causal relationships, reasoning about science findings requires understanding how evidence supports—or fails to support—a causal claim. This study investigated college students’ thinking about causal claims presented in brief media reports describing behavioral science findings. How do science students reason about causal claims from correlational evidence? And can their reasoning be improved through instruction clarifying the nature of causal theory error? We examined these questions through a series of written reasoning exercises given to advanced college students over three weeks within a psychology methods course. In a pretest session, students critiqued study quality and support for a causal claim from a brief media report suggesting an association between two variables. Then, they created diagrams depicting possible alternative causal theories. At the beginning of the second session, an instructional intervention introduced students to an extended example of a causal theory error through guided questions about possible alternative causes. Then, they completed the same two tasks with new science reports immediately and again 1 week later. The results show students’ reasoning included fewer causal theory errors after the intervention, and this improvement was maintained a week later. Our findings suggest that interventions aimed at addressing reasoning about causal claims in correlational studies are needed even for advanced science students, and that training on considering alternative causal theories may be successful in reducing casual theory error.

Testing Causal Theories with Learned Proxies

Social scientists commonly use computational models to estimate proxies of unobserved concepts, then incorporate these proxies into subsequent tests of their theories. The consequences of this practice, which occurs in over two-thirds of recent computational work in political science, are underappreciated. Imperfect proxies can reflect noise and contamination from other concepts, producing biased point estimates and standard errors. We demonstrate how analysts can use causal diagrams to articulate theoretical concepts and their relationships to estimated proxies, then apply straightforward rules to assess which conclusions are rigorously supportable. We formalize and extend common heuristics for “signing the bias”—a technique for reasoning about unobserved confounding—to scenarios with imperfect proxies. Using these tools, we demonstrate how, in often-encountered research settings, proxy-based analyses allow for valid tests for the existence and direction of theorized effects. We conclude with best-practice recommendations for the rapidly growing literature using learned proxies to test causal theories. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Political Science, Volume 25 is May 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

A Pragmatic Theory of Occupants' Indoor-Environmental Control Behaviour

Computational tools for building design and operation support entail fairly detailed representations of buildings' geometry, construction, and systems. Recent efforts aim at enhancing, in these tools, the relatively less developed models of building users. Thereby, one of the key challenges concerns the fit between the nature and level of needed support (e.g., performance queries) on the one hand and the required or appropriate resolution of the applied occupant model on the other hand. Some queries involving aggregate performance indicator may be sufficiently served by simple models of occupants' presence and actions in buildings. Detailed queries, however, may necessitate the implementation of high-resolution dynamic occupant representations. Methods to generate an occupant model may be fully data-driven, or they may be based on explicitly stated causal theories of human behaviour. However, there is not necessarily a sharp boundary between these approaches: Regularities harnessed by data-driven methods often reveal an implicit theoretical feature, as they are key to mapping processes from independent variables (model input) to dependent variables (manifest behaviour). Causal methods, on the other hand, need data to both develop and calibrate occupant methods. In this context, the present paper introduces the outline and main elements of a pragmatic theory of control-oriented human behaviour in buildings. The theory is suggested to inform the efforts towards construction of occupant models in computational applications related to building design, operation, and evaluation. Specifically, it can systematically guide the formulation of occupant-related ontologies and their instantiation in computational applications.

Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility Volume 7

This is the seventh volume of Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility (OSAR), and the fifth drawn from papers presented at the New Orleans Workshop on Agency and Responsibility (NOWAR, November 14–16, 2019). The OSAR series is devoted to publishing cutting edge, interdisciplinary work on the wide array of topics falling under the general rubric of ‘agency and responsibility.’ In this volume, roughly half of the chapters focus on agency, and half focus on responsibility. In the former camp, there are essays about the non-observational knowledge we have about our current intentional actions, constitutivism, answerability, organizational agency, socially embedded agency, and a brain sciences critique of causal theories of action. In the latter camp, there are essays about praise, guilt, blame, sanction, forgiveness, and disclaimers.

Causation and mnemonic roles: on Fernández’s Functionalism

Debates about causation have dominated recent philosophy of memory. While causal theorists have argued that an appropriate causal connection to a past experience is necessary for remembering, their opponents have argued that this necessity condition needs to be relaxed. Recently, Jordi Fernández (2018; 2019) has attempted to provide such a relaxation. On his functionalist theory of remembering, a given state need not be caused by a past experience to qualify as a memory; it only has to realize the relevant functional role in the subject’s mental economy. In this comment, I argue that Fernández’s theory doesn’t advance the debate about memory causation. I propose that this debate is best understood as being about the existence of systems, which support kinds of interactions that map onto the relations dictated by (causal) theories. Since Fernández’s functionalism tells us very little about this empirical question, the theoretical gains from endorsing it are minimal.

Kikuchi-Fujimoto disease: State of the art

Introduction: Kikuchi-Fujimoto disease (KFD), also called histiocytic necrotizing lymphadenitis, is a rare disease that occurs with swollen lymph nodes and associated fever. This disease occurs in both children and adults. Aim: The aim of our work was to review the literature and to remind family doctors, otolaryngologists, hematologists and rheumatologists about this rare disease that should be included in the differential diagnosis of long-term cervical lymphadenopathy. Material and methods: Current information on Kikuchi-Fujimoto disease was sought and presented based on literature that was published in reputable magazines in the period 2007–2020 in English. We searched for articles in the Medline, PubMed, and Scopus databases. Results and discussion: KFD occurs in both children and adults. This disease is found all over the world, most often in the Asian population. The etiology of Kikuchi-Fujimoto disease is not entirely known, however, two causal theories are suspected, which are discussed in detail in our article. The course of the disease is mild and usually disappears on its own. A biopsy of an involved lymph node presented as the standard for diagnosis. KFD treatment was causal – nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and/or glucocorticosteroids were used. Conclusions: There are few reports in the literature about Kikuchi-Fujimoto disease. KFD is associated with cervical lymphadenopathy and associated fever. If the diagnosis of the above-mentioned symptoms is not obvious, then in the differential diagnosis rarer diseases, such as KFD, should be included.

Against Jazz Combo Theories of Meaning and Reference

The “jazz combo theory” captures the common spirit of various theories that reject reference and the “bottom up” approach to the problem of objective representational content. We can imagine the members of a jazz combo initially playing together without any shared musical norms. But they continually adjust to one another until norms emerge and are mutually endorsed. Players start holding one another to these norms, and it’s this that gives the sounds they produce—what would otherwise be mere noise—determinate musical content. Similarly, on the jazz combo theory, what would otherwise be productions of meaningless strings by language users, come to constitute determinate linguistic acts with determinate propositional contents, by virtue of the users adopting, and holding one another to, a shared set of linguistic and discursive norms. This chapter argues that jazz combo theorists overstate the case against reference, although they’re right in stressing the importance of norms and their dependence on social interaction. Jazz combo theorists tend to reject bottom-up approaches, including causal theories, because they take those approaches to be incompatible with the explanatory priority of the sentence and to fail to bridge the supposed gap between cause and norm. A number of conceptual tools are introduced to counter their arguments and to defend the consistency of the dynamic priority of the sentence, the syntactic correlativity of sentences and their constituents, and the semantic priority of constituents.