Number of predicted effects influences strength of cause-and-effect judgments
People can judge how strong a cause-and-effect relationship is even without knowing the exact connection between the cause and effect. This study looked at how the power of an explanation affects these judgments. By changing the number of effects predicted by an explanation, researchers found that the more comprehensive an explanation is, the stronger people perceive the causal relationship to be. This suggests that when we don't have all the data, we might use the depth of an explanation as a shortcut to estimate how strong a cause-and-effect relationship is.
