Markus Eronen (University of Groningen)
In this paper, I will argue that interventionist causal discovery faces great obstacles in psychology, due to the special subject matter of psychology (i.e., human individuals and their minds/brains). First, psychological interventions are likely to be both fat-handed and soft, and there are currently no conceptual tools for making causal inferences based on such interventions. Second, causal control in psychology seems to be realistically possible only at the group level, but group-level findings do not allow inferences to individual-level causal relationships. Finally, I consider the implications these have for the debate on mental causation and for psychological research.
