An Invitation to Causal Inference in Environmental Psychology

This chapter introduces causal inference within environmental psychology, underscoring its fundamental differences from traditional statistical analysis. The content is organised into four main sections: 1. Non-technical introduction. Stating a causal question requires defining pre-specified contrasts between interventions experienced by an entire population. Because each individual can experience only one intervention, causal effects must be estimated using assumptions. We build intuitions for these assumptions by clarifying their satisfaction in randomised controlled experiments. 2. Causal Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) tutorial. Causal DAGs are potent tools for clarifying whether and how causal effects may be identified from data. We explain how they work. 3. Practical examples. We apply causal DAGs to common scenarios in observational environmental psychology. 4.Guidelines. The main aim of this chapter is to motivate broader adoption of causal workflows.