Adults hold two parallel causal frameworks for reasoning about people’s minds, actions and bodies

Understanding other people involves making sense of their physical actions, mental states, and physiological experiences, yet little is known about the causal beliefs we hold across these domains. Across two exploratory studies, we measured these beliefs and their use in social cognition. In Study 1 (N = 50, M age = 39.44y), US adults (1) freely sorted and (2) reported causal beliefs about events of the mind, body, and actions. Representational similarity analysis (RSA) revealed two causal frameworks: one representing the 3 distinct latent categories, and another expressing causal relationships across them. Study 2 (N = 100, M age = 39.95y) demonstrated that adults flexibly apply either framework depending on the task, using the latent causes for trait inference, and causal beliefs to plan interventions on other agents. These findings suggest that intuitive theories of other people include both a sense of which capacities“go together” and their causal connections within and across domains.