Decision-making and the Causal World: Choice as Intervention
Steven Sloman
(Brown University)
September 28
Lubrano Conference Room

Abstract

I'll present a concise overview of the psychology of judgment and decision making, focusing on the work of Kahneman and Tversky, and then turn to the role of causal models in choice. A framework for reasoning about causality has been developed by Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines (1993) and is reviewed in Pearl (2000). The fundamental idea is that people represent the world by decomposing it into autonomous causal mechanisms that support interventions. On this view, human reasoning is understood as a tool to support human action. The application of the ideas to decision making reveals that good decisions depend on causal analysis and that choice is a form of intervention. I describe a couple of experimental tests of whether people's choices conform to these constraints.