A fundamental way to reason about causation is in terms of direct contact, like billiard balls colliding. Although collision-like causes have played an important role in philosophical and psychological theories of causation, humans conceptualize many events that lack direct contact as causes. If Andy hits Suzy with his bike, Suzy falls into a fence and it breaks, Andy is a cause of the fence breaking. We also treat absences as causes. If Suzy forgets sunscreen and gets sunburned, the absence of sunscreen is a cause. Moreover, there are linguistic distinctions between verbs that refer to these: Andy ‘caused’ the fence to break but Suzy ‘broke’ it. The absence of sunscreen ‘caused’ Suzy’s sunburn, but the sun ‘burned’ it. We explored how children develop these mappings, focusing on ‘cause’ and verbs like ‘burn’. Because ‘make’ is more frequent than ‘cause’, we included it too. We tested 690 children and 150 adults. Experiment 1 examined causal chains. Children as young as 4 thought Andy ‘caused’ the fence to break, but Suzy ‘broke’ it and ‘made’ it break. Experiment 2 examined causation by absence. Only older children thought the absence of sunscreen ‘caused’ the sunburn. Yet in Experiment 3, even 4-year-olds cited absences in explaining Suzy’s sunburn. Despite rarely hearing ‘cause’, young children understand it and verbs like ‘break’ to mark subtle distinctions between causes: ‘break’ refers to direct causes; ‘cause’ to indirect causes in chains. Absences are more challenging, but children refer to them in causal explanations before mapping ‘cause’ to them.
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