Abstract

We investigated how people design interventions to affect the outcomes of causal systems. We propose that the abstract structural properties of a causal system, in addition to people's content and mechanism knowledge, influence decisions about how to intervene. In Experiment 1, participants preferred to intervene at specific locations in a causal chain regardless of which content variables occupied those positions. In Experiment 2, participants were more likely to intervene on root causes versus immediate causes when they were presented with a long-term goal versus a short-term goal. These results show that the structural properties of a causal system can guide the design of interventions