Abstract Finding causes is a central goal in psychological research. In this paper, I argue based on the interventionist approach to causal discovery that the search for psychological causes faces great obstacles. Psychological interventions are likely to be fat-handed: they change several variables simultaneously, and it is not known to what extent such interventions give leverage for causal inference. Moreover, due to problems of measurement, the degree to which an intervention was fat-handed, or more generally, what the intervention in fact did, is difficult to reliably estimate. A further complication is that the causal findings in psychology are typically made at the population level, and such findings do not allow inferences to individual-level causal relationships. I also discuss the implications of these problems for research, as well as various ways of addressing them, such as focusing more on the discovery of robust but non-causal patterns.

中文翻译：

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因果发现与心理干预问题

摘要 寻找原因是心理学研究的核心目标。在这篇论文中，我基于因果发现的干预主义方法认为，寻找心理原因面临着巨大的障碍。心理干预很可能是笨手笨脚的：它们同时改变了几个变量，并且不知道这种干预在多大程度上为因果推断提供了杠杆作用。此外，由于测量问题，难以可靠地估计干预的严重程度，或者更一般地说，干预实际上做了什么。更复杂的情况是，心理学中的因果发现通常是在人群水平上进行的，并且此类发现不允许对个体水平的因果关系进行推断。我还讨论了这些问题对研究的影响，