Causal reasoning is a cognitive competency essential to understand and adapt to the world. This thesis intends to contribute to the literature on the development of causal reasoning and is motivated by the possibility that children rely upon a dispositional causal schema that provides one intuitive meaning of causation. This possibility is derived from a literature review that shows that key dispositional concepts are implicitly already present in the development of causal reasoning literature and that data on children fitting with these key dispositional elements are found in the theory-theory literature on conceptual development. As such, this thesis builds upon a theoretical framework – dispositional theory – that has, to my best knowledge, not been explicitly applied to the study of the development of causal reasoning. Dispositional theories share the common point that they model causal relations as interactions between causal participants endowed with dispositions. Dispositions can be thought of as being intrinsic properties belonging to specific causal participants.
Given the possibility that children rely upon a dispositional causal schema, the dissertation encompasses three studies that explore whether 7/8-year-old children use dispositional schemas to make sense of causal events and if so assess (i) which of the dispositional features appear in children’s causal reasoning and (ii) if and how such a use differs between children and adults. To that end, the studies rely on two different methodological approaches and mainly investigate causal understanding of events that fall into the domain of physics. The first study adapts a method introduced by Shtulman and Valcarel (2012) and assesses if 7/8-year-old children’s and adults’ causal interpretation of a collision event could have been generated by a dispositional schema. The second study continues to investigate if 7-to-8-years-old children’s and adults’ causal understanding of events that fall into the domain of physics could have been generated by a dispositional schema. But, compared to the first study, the second study employs a different methodological approach introduced by White (2013) and considers a wider range of events in the domain of physics. The third study investigates children’s and adults’ causal understanding of events that involve human agents using a method closely related to the one of the second study. Results support the idea, that not only adults, but also children use a dispositional schema to generate one intuitive meaning of causation. Findings further suggest that a large majority of events were interpreted asymmetrically by both adults and children. Not all dispositional features are equally supported by data, force patterns seemed to play a more important role than agentive/teleological/antagonistic aspects. Overall there were mixed results in regards to developmental differences and if anything results suggest that adults rely more on a dispositional schema than children.