Does normality influence children's causal selections?

Our expectations about what normally occurs influence our explanations. In conjunctive causal structures, people tend to select the more abnormal cause. This tendency reverses in disjunctive structures, and people select the normal cause. It is currently unknown how these tendencies develop, and what factors contribute to their emergence in childhood. Across three experiments, we tested adults (n = 179) and 5- to 7-year-olds (n = 96) on two tasks where an abnormal and normal factor jointly caused an outcome. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that while adults' explanations varied according to the causal structure, children exclusively chose the normal cause, regardless of causal structure. Using a task with an intuitive and explicit causal mechanism, Experiment 3 found that children were more likely to select the abnormal cause in the conjunctive case than in previous experiments. This suggests that intuitions about causal mechanisms may facilitate adult-like judgments. We consider potential explanations, including the role of counterfactual reasoning.