ReviewNature human behaviour2024
Causal inference on human behaviour.
Review in Nature human behaviour, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Temperament, personality, and psychopathology in youth: A preregistered multilevel meta-analytic review and preregistered large-scale replication and extension.Psychological bulletin · 2026Pooled it
- Physical punishment and lifelong outcomes in low‑ and middle‑income countries: a systematic review and multilevel meta-analysis.Nature human behaviour · 2025Pooled it
- Psychotherapy for PTSD - a scoping review of how change during treatment has been studied.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2026Article
- All Is Relative-A Call for Considering "Physiologically Informed" Control Conditions to Improve the Mechanistic Understanding of the Effects of Physical Exercise on Cognition.Scandinavian journal of psychology · 2026Review
- BriDGE the gap: Improving behavioral research by integrating DAGs and GAMs into experiments.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Cue-Based Authenticity Appraisals in Limited-Verifiability Contexts: A Two-Study Test in Historic Automotive Events.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Article
- A counterfactual and random intercept cross-lagged panel analysis of the effects of reading frequency on adolescent mental health in a large longitudinal study.JCPP advances · 2026Article
- Linking functional and structural dendritic spine remodeling during fear learning and extinction in vivo.Science advances · 2026Article
- Ambient heat and early childhood development: a cross-national analysis.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2026Article
- Neighborhood Social Disorganization in Early Adolescence and Substance Use Trajectories into Young Adulthood: The Moderating Role of Effortful Control and Parental Substance Use.Journal of youth and adolescence · 2026Article
- LGBTQIA+ People's Perspectives on LGBTQIA+-Targeted State Policies and Mental Health: A Qualitative Study.JAMA network open · 2026Article
- The dual correlations between core beliefs changes and emotion regulation among disaster-affected residents: the moderating role of religiousness orientation.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- No evidence for causal effects of trust in science on intentions for health-related behavior.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Is poor control over thoughts and emotions related to a higher tendency to delay tasks? The link between procrastination, emotional dysregulation and attentional control.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2025Article
- Sex differences in response to violence: role of salience network expansion and connectivity on depression.Translational psychiatry · 2025Article
- Evidence triangulator: using large language models to extract and synthesize causal evidence across study designs.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Robust inference and widespread genetic correlates from a large-scale genetic association study of human personality.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- An entropic explanation of insistence on sameness in autism.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2025Article
- Cause-effect perception in an object place task.Frontiers in cognition · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
14 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Making causal inferences regarding human behaviour is difficult given the complex interplay between countless contributors to behaviour, including factors in the external world and our internal states. We provide a non-technical conceptual overview of challenges and opportunities for causal inference on human behaviour. The challenges include our ambiguous causal language and thinking, statistical under- or over-control, effect heterogeneity, interference, timescales of effects and complex treatments. We explain how methods optimized for addressing one of these challenges frequently exacerbate other problems. We thus argue that clearly specified research questions are key to improving causal inference from data. We suggest a triangulation approach that compares causal estimates from (quasi-)experimental research with causal estimates generated from observational data and theoretical assumptions. This approach allows a systematic investigation of theoretical and methodological factors that might lead estimates to converge or diverge across studies.
Indexed as
Identifiers
39179747What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.