Attributed To The Cognitive Process Research

Philosophical theories of causation can go back to Aristotle in ancientGreek. who proposed two types of causal explanation f tInal causes andefficient causes. Later on. philosophers usually developed one of the twotypes of it separately, which influenced psychology that two traditionalresearch aPproaches on causal attribution came out. Efficient causes areresources of covariational aPproach, while mechanism aPproach wasderived from final causes. Covariational aPproach has always been thedominant one in the researches on causal attribution. From Heider on,Kelley, Cheng and Novick et.al al1 folIowed covariational approach todeduce reasons strictly. It focuses on the question of "how people decide'who' or 'what' cause an effect to occur" and sees events as composed of aset of independent factors and only the factors covaring with the explainedbehaviors or events ca-n be determined as their causes- While mechanismaPproach is weaker,and it is not until recently that Ahn et.al proposed it. Itstresses the role of mechanisms or processes underlying an event f the crucialdeterminant of infetring causality is people's knowledge of mechanism. Amechanism is some component of an event which is thought to havecausal force or causal necessity. This approach treats event as composed of"surface" factor and one (or more) underlying, responsible mechanisms, andcares for the question of "'how' events haPpened".Though the achievements of covariational approach are getting more andmore rich and mature, it has been criticized and chaIlenged continua1lybecause of its weaAnesses which it ca-n't overcome itself Whilemechanism approach get into its stride latef, it has showed higher bio1ogicalvalidity. The aim of this research was to review, compare and summarize thetwo research approaches on causal attribution's cognition processes and tryto propose its suggestion. The reseaxch was carried out on covariationinformation and mechanism information. It had two experiments fExperimentl reviewed what kind of infOrmation subjects wouId look fOrunder natural conditions. In this experiment, 40 undergraduates wererandomly assigned to a condition of a 2 (instruction f covariation-biased,neutral)x2 (events representation' no-schema, schema) between-subject de-sign. The dependent variables were the types of information proposed bysubjects. Experiment2 anaIyzed the relation between covariationinformation and mechanism information. l28 undergraduates took part inlIlthe experiment under 6 conditions. It adopted between-subject design andthe values of thctors' causal power were its dependent variables.m1-- + ci ilc following conclusions were drawn fYom the above two experimentsand the former resultsil. Convariation intbrmation was used much less than non-convariationintbrmation (most ot it is tnechanism intbrmation ) in causal attributionunder natural conditions. Informatiofl-seeking paradigm is an etTectivecausaI attribution research method.2. mechanism infOrmation plays a stronger roIe than convariationinfOrmation in causa1 attribution. the two kinds of information aredifferent in essence.3. Convariation information and mechanism information are indispensableeach other in causal attribution's cognition processes.In causalattribution, convariationa1 aPproach should combined with mechanismapproach to make new breakthIoughs.The findings have importa*nt imp1ications for enriching the theory oncausa1 attribution's cognition processes and practical values fOr people'sunderstanding, foreteI1ing and contro1ling the world.