The Bayesian Mutation Sampler Explains Distributions of Causal Judgments.

One consistent finding in the causal reasoning literature is that causal judgments are rather variable. In particular, distributions of probabilistic causal judgments tend not to be normal and are often not centered on the normative response. As an explanation for these response distributions, we propose that people engage in 'mutation sampling' when confronted with a causal query and integrate this information with prior information about that query.