Unpacking the Black Box of Causality: Learning about Causal Mechanisms from Experimental and Observational Studies

By Kosuke Imai, Luke Keele, Dustin Tingley, Teppei Yamamoto. American Political Science Review, 2011

1,378 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Identifying causal mechanisms is a fundamental goal of social science. Researchers seek to study not only whether one variable affects another but also how such a causal relationship arises. Yet commonly used statistical methods for identifying causal mechanisms rely upon untestable assumptions and are often inappropriate even under those assumptions. Randomizing treatment and intermediate variables is also insufficient. Despite these difficulties, the study of causal mechanisms is too important to abandon. We make three contributions to improve research on causal mechanisms. First, we present a minimum set of assumptions required under standard designs of experimental and observational studies and develop a general algorithm for estimating causal mediation effects. Second, we provide a method for assessing the sensitivity of conclusions to potential violations of a key assumption. Third, we offer alternative research designs for identifying causal mechanisms under weaker assumptions. The proposed approach is illustrated using media framing experiments and incumbency advantage studies.

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e0cc084cb8d9f02883ffc87825f16328e8024875

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Citations in the corpus

The causal interpretation of estimated associations in regression models (2019, background): “See Imai et al. (2011), Acharya et al. (2016), and Van der Weele (2015) for more details on indirect and direct effects.”
The Influence of Emotion on Trust (2016, methodology): “…frame the problem of experimental manipulations affecting more than one emotion by using the causal mediation analysis framework (e.g., Imai, Keele, and Tingley 2010a,b; Imai et al. 2011) to account for the collateral effects of a manipulation on non-target emotions.”
Violence, Empathy and Altruism: Evidence from the Ivorian Refugee Crisis in Liberia (2018, neutral): “72 Imai et al. 2011.”
An Experimental Test of the Expectancy-Disconfirmation Theory of Citizen Satisfaction (2013, background): “It should be pointed out, however, that even randomized experiments remain limited in terms of their ability to fully identify mediation effects, a methodological issue that has been raised recently in the social sciences but that does not have an easy solution (Bullock, Green, & Ha, 2010; Imai et a”
Interpretation and identification of causal mediation. (2014, neutral): “3) and (Imai et al., 2011b); the latter supplements the description with graphs to facilitate communication.”
Moral Support: How Moral Values Shape Foreign Policy Attitudes (2014, methodology): “Thus, we perform a series of nonparametric mediation analyses (Imai et al. 2011), in which each of the five moral foundations’ effects on CI, MI, and isolationism are mediated by political ideology, the results of which are depicted in Figure 2.”