Psychological Causality Research Articles

Wundt's psychological experiment in the light of his philosophy of science

Wundt initiated the first systematic psychological research programme. This achievement occurred at the same time as his elaboration of a philosophy of science which was anti-inductivist and stressed the priority of explanatory motives. Specifically psychological explanations depended on concepts of psychological causality as manifested in apperceptive or volitional processes. The major differences between the Wundtian and other models of psychological experimentation can be understood in the light of this general approach. Thus experimenters and subjects had to be enlightened collaborators and the role of introspection was more significant in an explanatory than in a purely observational context. Wundt's special requirements for the psychological experiment led him to reject other early models as exemplified by the hypnotic experiment in which the experimenter-subject relationship was closer to what was to become the norm in the twentieth century.

Children's Conceptions of Psychological Causality as Related to Subjective Responsibility, Conservation, and Language

Children's Conceptions of Psychological Causality as Related to Subjective Responsibility, Conservation, and Language

Some Relationships Between Children's Conceptions of Psychological and Physical Causality

Summary Measures of psychological causality, morality, justice, physical causality, skepticism, animism, and the ability to take other perspectives were individually administered to 41 kindergarten and first-grade children. An orthogonally rotated principal-components analysis indicated four factors. Factor I, social judgment, included measures of morality, justice, skepticism, and perspectives. The second and third factors were identified as psychological and physical causality, respectively. Factor IV was identified as Conceptions of Life and is discussed in another study (5). The results offered some support for Piaget's views that the attribution of physical and psychological causation have different bases and sources of origin.

A Factor-Analytic Investigation of Child Animism

Summary From a factor analysis of 33 variables on 83 first-grade children an animism factor, involving children's conceptions of life, was identified. Animism was found to be relatively independent of operational thought, Piagetiantype problem solving, and the ability to give causal explanations of physical phenomena. In a second study, a similar animism factor emerged from a factor analysis of 11 variables, Animistic conceptions were unrelated to children's reasoning about various interpersonal situations: i.e., morality, justice, and psychological causality. In addition to an interpretation of the factor involving possible differences in criteria used for life attribution, the specificity of the factor was underscored.

Critical Analysis of the Concept of Causality in Behavioristic Psychology

A number of problems in contemporary psychology can be attributed to the influence of Hume's perceptual-level view of causality. This influence is most clearly manifested in Skinner's descriptive behaviorism which advocates the search for functional relationships between observable sequences of events. In general, Hume's views have: (1) led psychologists to attempt to redefine terms pertaining to consciousness in behavioral language, thereby producing conceptual chaos; (2) systematically encouraged the study of trivial types of learning in preference to the study of man's conceptual abilities; and (3) resulted in the appearance of blatant contradictions between theory and practice.

Unconscious causality and the pyramid of science.

The essence of Freud's concept of the unconscious concerns psychological causality. Three critical causal principles are contained in Freud's theorizing: causal models are always—by the very nature of the mental apparatus—incomplete and partly false; psychoanalytic causal models are offered to gain knowledge and understanding, not prediction and control; there are different orders of causes which vary in efficacy and frame of reference. Preconditions are not causally relevant. Immediate experience usually presupposes an interior psychological causal process. It is, therefore, an epistemological error to explain all immediate experience by recourse to behaviorism or neurophysiology. The "pyramid of science," which assumes that all psychological causes are reducible to physical or sensorial causes, and that all hypothetical constructs must ultimately have sensory content, is the basis for oft-heard erroneous criticisms of the notion of unconscious causality.

Exploring Causality in Social Psychology

Exploring Causality in Social Psychology

Children's Conceptions of Psychological Causality

Children's Conceptions of Psychological Causality

On the Notion of Causality in Psychology

On the Notion of Causality in Psychology