A counterfactual explanation for recency effects in double prevention scenarios: commentary on Thanawala & Erb (2024)

Many cognitive scientists and philosophers take cases of double prevention to be one of the primary motivations for accepting causal pluralism, the view that people have multiple concepts of causation. Thanawala and Erb (2024) recently argue against Lombrozo's (2010) account of causal pluralism. They find that the temporal order of events affects people's causal judgments in double prevention cases, and they interpret this finding as showing that people use a productive concept of causation in double prevention scenarios. In contrast to this interpretation, we suggest that these new effects can be explained in terms of counterfactual reasoning. Specifically, the temporal order of events might influence the extent to which people simulate counterfactual alternatives to these events. We show that under this assumption, a recent counterfactual model of causal judgment can reproduce all qualitative effects of temporal order found in Thanawala and Erb's (2024) new work. Crucially, participants appear to preferentially simulate counterfactual alternatives to recent events, in line with work on counterfactual reasoning. Our findings complement past research that applied the counterfactual framework to temporal effects and double prevention independently, suggesting that these explanations are highly generalizable.