An interventionist approach to causation in psychology
Abstract
Abstract Interventionist analyses make explicit the conception of causation used in experimental science, but have not been applied to the case of mental causation. This chapter addresses some of the basic problems of mental causation in interventionist terms. It proposes a way of finding the “right level” of variables to use in characterizing the causal workings of a system, whether we should be describing causal relations in psychological rather than biological terms. It argues that a notion of “soft” intervention is needed when discussing causation by reasons. Finally, we can make sense of the idea of causation without mechanisms, and we may have to do that when we are considering the outcomes of combinations of psychological and biological variables.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
To establish whether sleeping problems are causally associated with mental health difficulties, it is necessary to experimentally manipulate sleep to see whether changes in sleep lead to changes in mental health over time.
“Therefore, to establish whether sleeping problems are causally associated with mental health difficulties, it is necessary to experimentally manipulate sleep to see whether changes in sleep lead to changes in mental health over time (i.e., the interventionist approach to causation, [46]).”
From Improving sleep quality leads to better mental health: A meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials (2021) · cites this paper as [46]
Cites
The environment and disease: association or causation?
Hill, A. B. (2015) · Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine · doi:10.1177/0141076814562718 · Cited by 7,302 · see citing works
The Environment and Disease: Association or Causation?
Hill, A. B. (1965) · Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine · doi:10.1177/003591576505800503 · Cited by 6,974 · see citing works
Causation, Prediction, and Search
Spirtes, P., Glymour, C., & Scheines, R. (1993) · Lecture Notes in Statistics · doi:10.1007/978-1-4612-2748-9 · Cited by 4,617 · see citing works
Making things happen: a theory of causal explanation
(2004) · Choice Reviews Online · doi:10.5860/choice.41-5840 · Cited by 3,383 · see citing works
Kendler, K. S., Hettema, J. M., Butera, F., Gardner, C. O., & Prescott, C. A. (2003) · Archives of General Psychiatry · doi:10.1001/archpsyc.60.8.789 · Cited by 966 · see citing works
Kendler, K. S., Kuhn, J. W., Vittum, J., Prescott, C. A., & Riley, B. P. (2005) · Archives of General Psychiatry · doi:10.1001/archpsyc.62.5.529 · Cited by 669 · see citing works
Coltheart, M. (1999) · Trends in Cognitive Sciences · doi:10.1016/s1364-6613(99)01289-9 · Cited by 415 · see citing works
Independence, Invariance and the Causal Markov Condition
Hausman, D. M., & Woodward, J. (1999) · The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science · doi:10.1093/bjps/50.4.521 · Cited by 371 · see citing works
Explanatory Generalizations, Part I: A Counterfactual Account
Woodward, J., & Hitchcock, C. (2003) · Noûs · doi:10.1111/1468-0068.00426 · Cited by 317 · see citing works
Crawford, F. S. (1982) · American Journal of Physics · doi:10.1119/1.13080 · Cited by 47 · see citing works
Probabilistic Soft Interventions in Conditional Gaussian Networks
Markowetz, F. M., Grossmann, S., & Spang, R. (2005) · MPG.PuRe (Max Planck Society) · Cited by 20 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Scott, A. J., Webb, T. L., Martyn-St James, M., Rowse, G., & Weich, S. (2021) · Sleep Medicine Reviews · doi:10.1016/j.smrv.2021.101556 · Cited by 1,094 · see citing works
Causal Structure Learning: A Combinatorial Perspective
Squires, C., & Uhler, C. (2023) · Foundations of Computational Mathematics · doi:10.1007/s10208-022-09581-9 · Cited by 31 · see citing works
- Authors
- Campbell, J.
- Corresponding author
- Campbell, John
- ORCID
- Campbell, John
- Venue
- Causal Learning
- Publisher
- Oxford University PressNew York
- Published
- 2007-04-26
- Pages
- 58-66
- OpenAlex
- W2483904769
- Cited by
- 73
- References
- 11
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 4 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 3 · 2019: 14 · 2018: 5 · 2017: 12 · 2016: 2 · 2014: 4 · 2013: 4 · 2012: 3
- FWCI
- 22.54
- Type
- book chapter
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Philosophy and History of Science
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Philosophy and Theoretical Science
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Free Will and Agency
- Keywords
- mental causation, interventionism, soft interventions, causal mechanisms, levels of description, psychological explanation
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
