(CAUSATION)
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Cause and effect (or simply causation)
refers to a specific relationship between events in time. If you
fail to look both ways before crossing a street and get hit by a car, the
cause is failing to look and the effect is getting hit. If a doctor
tells you that you have a broken leg from the accident, the broken leg
is the effect of getting hit by the car, which is the cause. An event
(in this case, the accident) can be both a cause and an effect of other
events.
As a strategy of development, causation
answers the question "Why did it happen?" You will find causation useful
not only by itself but also combined with other strategies. It is
often used with process because how something happened (process) is often
related to why something happened (causation).
For many subjects--particularly those
related to social and political matters--causes and effects are ambiguous
or indistinct, leaving you unsure about the truth of the situation.
Therefore, you must be very careful when you discuss causes and effects.
For many subjects you also have the reactions of your reader to worry about
because your analysis of a cause-and-effect relationship might be controversial,
and your reader may not agree with you. For example, in discussions
about causes and effects in certain social issues--such as crime or government
spending--some readers may object to your analysis. Therefore, stance
is very important in this strategy.
Recognizing the Signs of Causation
In order to identify and determine whether or not a cause-and-effect relationship is logical, you should look for certain signs. Two of the most common are:
The Sign of Association.
Suppose you find two events, A and B, in association. Their being
together could imply that A causes B, or vice versa. However, B must
ordinarily occur whenever A does--otherwise you probably don't have a genuine
cause-and-effect relationship. For instance, hair should bleach when
a strong solution of peroxide is applied to it; the cook should burn his
hand every time he touches a very hot skillet handle.
The Sign of Time-Sequence.
If B comes after A in time, this fact may imply a causal relationship.
If a student stays up all night studying, the fatigue he suffers the next
day is an effect signaled by time. But determining time-sequence
is so tricky that a special name has been given to the fallacy of misinterpreting
it. The fallacy is called post hoc (short for post
hoc, ergo propter hoc--"after this, therefore because of this").
You create the post hoc fallacy if you say that A causes B merely because
B comes after A. In other words, if the 8:30 train comes after the 8:15
train, you cannot say that the earlier train "causes" the later one.
In brief, the signs of causation are no
more than signs--they are not proofs. To avoid making fallacies in
thinking about causation, you must take each sign and investigate it carefully.
Never assume that a causal relationship exists until you find proof.
| One cause |  |
One effect |
| A strong head wind will cause the biker to gear down. | ||
| One cause | |
Two or more effects |
| A slight
rise in the road causes increased pressure
on the pedal so the biker gears down. |
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| Two or more causes | |
One effect |
| Failing to gear down
while going uphill or against a strong headwind |
can create | serious knee problems. |
| Two or more causes | |
Two or more effects |
| Short toe clips and a seat too high | can cause | serious knee problems and pain in the legs. |
The diagram above shows four types of cause-and-effect
sequences that you should be aware of. (The examples support the thesis:
Proper gearing and equipment may help a biker
avoid leg and knee problems.)
In most situations,
more than one cause or effect is involved. Drug addiction,
for example, may have several causes, and these causes may have more than
a single effect.
Following is an annotated cause-and-effect
paper written by a student. Notice the writer's use of transitions,
examples, and summary statements, making the cause-and-effect relationship
clear.
| Definition of term
by negation |
Student-watchers have long identified a common type on campus--the "Joiner." I don't mean the woman who belongs to the band and the Pi Phis, and maybe in her junior year joins an accounting honorary. Nor do I mean the engineer who |
| Question posed;
answered by succeeding pars. |
belongs to a mere three organizations. Nothing so limiting works for the true joiner, who may belong to six or eight organizations, and who may pop up in student government as well. What makes joiners join? |
| First cause,
supported by three examples |
First, joiners like the limelight. Most of the groups they belong to are visible. On the dorm council they write petitions, or collect the petitions of others. In the marching band they perform before thousands of people. In fraternities, they are the treasurers who hound people for money and make long reports in meetings on the state of fraternal economy. |
| Transition
introducing second cause with one example |
As these remarks imply, joiners
like to run things. My sister is a joiner, and one can be sure that
any group she belongs to, she is president or leader of it. If the
group has no
important office to fill, she will run it by indirection, volunteering to do this or that job, writing any necessary letters or |
| Summary
statement explaining effect of cause |
memos, being the first one at the meeting and the last to leave. Nojob is too small for her to take on cheerfully. By the end of the semester, any group she joins discovers that she has become its chief bottle-washer and major spokesman. She has fulfilled her desire to control events and people. |
| Last cause with
transition, finally |
Finally, joiners join because they must have something to do with themselves. They are usually hyperactive. Have you ever seen a joiner sitting alone, perhaps in the Union, just reading a book? Sam, on the men's side of my dorm, is a |
| Example | Joiner; and for all the time I have known him, he has never been alone. People in the dorm say that Sam even goes to the bathroom with somebody. He belongs to eight organizations, |
| Surprise ending | and will someday be president of the country--if he can just decide which political party to join. |
Occasionally, it is necessary and rhetorically
useful to organize a cause-and-effect essay or paragraph by introducing
the effect first, then giving an explanation of the causes. Note
how the writer in the following excerpt explains why the poor have more
garbage than the rich.
| Effect | ...
low-income neighborhoods in Tucson discard 86 percent more garbage per
week per household than do high-income areas, and 40 percent more waste
than medium-
income districts. There is a trick to that statistic. There are more people per household in low-income areas. But, even dividing on a per person basis, the poor produce more garbage than the middle class and only slightly less than the rich. |
| Question: why? | Why? It's not so hard to figure out. The rich buy antiques, the poor buy and throw away cheap or used furniture. The rich give their old clothes to the "Goodwill," the poor buy them there, wear them out and throw them away. And it is the poor and the working people who discard most of the packaging waste. They are the ones who drink soft drinks and beer and eat low-cost canned vegetables and canned stews, fish sticks, |
| Causes | pot pies, and T.V. dinners. And, if they eat out at all, it is at McDonalds or Burger King or Kentucky Fried Chicken, with the packaging which that entails. It is the rich who have their food flown in fresh daily from Florida or Spain. It is the rich who eat in the fancy French restaurants with all those superb dishes prepared from scratch, sans packaging and san disposable dinner ware --Judd Alexander, "Truth and Consequences" |
SUGGESTIONS
FOR WRITING
CAUSE-AND-EFFECT
PAPERS
When describing causation, remember this advice:
1. Investigate your subject thoroughly, either from your own firsthand knowledge or from research. Identifying the causes and effects in a subject that you know firsthand can be easy to do. Your dissatisfaction with your roommate, for instance, may be based on the fact that he won't do his share in keeping the apartment clean. The cause is his laziness or carelessness. The effect is your anger and frustration. But identifying the causes of pollution in Los Angeles is much more difficult because pollution is a complex problem, and without doing research, you will not know enough to write about the subject.
2. Qualify your
generalizations carefully when you draw cause-and-effect relationships.
Do not hesitate to use qualifiers such as "it seems to me," "it may be,"
or "the evidence points to." In most cause-and-effect relationships, you
deal in probabilities rather than certainties, particularly when you get
out of the realm of scientific subjects.
3. Be sure that your time-sequence is accurate and inclusive. This is especially true when you are explaining scientific causes and effects. You should present the chronology of the steps as they actually occur, and you should include every important link in the chain of events in order to ensure the accuracy of your paper. Here is an effective explanation of why Mexican jumping beans jump:
A simple explanation reveals
the secret of the fascinating twisting, turning and jumping of the beans.
Inside each bean is a tiny yellow caterpillar, the larvae of a small moth.
How does it get there? The moth lays an egg in the flower of the
spurge shrub. In time the eggs hatch and the larvae are said to work
their way deep into the blossom, where they are eventually encased in the
seeds.
The caterpillar devours a large
part of the inside of the seed, so that it occupies about one-fifth of
the interior of its little home. To move the bean, the caterpillar
grasps the silken wall of the bean with its legs and vigorously snaps its
body, striking its head against the other end of the bean and sending it
this way or that. The bean may actually travel several inches at
a time, or leap in the air. Some people call them bronco beans because
of the way they jump.
A jumping bean may keep up its
antics for as long as six months. Then the caterpillar finally emerges
from its house and becomes a moth.
5. Do not ignore immediate effects in a chain of multiple effects. Note this description of the multiple effects of the cholera organism:
For centuries, men had known that cholera was a fatal disease, and that it caused severe diarrhea, sometimes producing as many as thirty quarts of fluid a day. Men knew this, but they somehow assumed that the lethal effects of the disease were unrelated to the diarrhea; they searched for something else: an antidote, a drug, a way to kill the organism. It was not until modern times that cholera was recognized as a disease that killed through dehydration primarily; if you could replace a victim's water losses rapidly, he would survive the infection without other drugs or treatment.
A diagram of this chain of cause and effect might look like this:
Cholera organism (first cause)
6. Much of what we loosely call "cause and effect" is actually "correlation." In the process of identifying causation, researchers study samples to see if they can establish a pattern from which a generalization can be drawn about why something occurred. For example, from many medical experiments, researchers have discovered that there is a correlation between high cholesterol level and heart disease. They do not conclude that high cholesterol level causes heart disease but that a significant correlation exists between the two. You may use correlation in an analysis of cause and effect, but do not identify as causes what may only be correlations.