What "Causes" What??

I was thinking today about how loosely we use the term "cause" in research. We go into research wanting to demonstrate (or explore the possibility) that something causes something. We may be interested in finding out if having loving parents as a child causes us to be giving adults. We may want to show that video games cause violent behavior...or maybe that being predisposed toward violence causes one to be interested in playing video games.

The truth of the matter is that we can not determine cause from statistical results. We may get that wonderfully low "p-value" for statistical significance...but even that says little to nothing about causation. Our results may replicate previous findings; yet, that still is not sufficient for causation. It may make intuitive sense, and everyone might nod their heads in agreement...but 400 friends agreeing that eating eggs causes one to spend more time on the Internet does not make that true....even if the results of a statistical analysis were to suggest that :)

Determining causation is actually a matter of philosophy and depends on things like the design of the experiment, itself....not the statistical analysis. In fact, one could earn a doctoral degree in philosophy with a dissertation on nothing but the topic of causation. Depending on the source and theoretical framework, there are many sets of criteria one could choose from for defending causation. For the purposes of research results interpretation, we are better suited to use phrases such as

"the results of the analysis suggest that _____ may cause _____"

rather than

"the results prove that _____ causes _____ .

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