Narratives + Diagrams: An Integrated Approach for Externalizing and Sharing People's Causal Beliefs

Causal knowledge is of interest in many areas, such as statistics and machine learning, as it allows people and algorithms to predict outcomes and make data-driven decisions. Researchers in CSCW have proposed tools and workflows to externalize causal knowledge or beliefs from a group of people; however, most of the generated causal diagrams lack a deeper understanding of the causal mechanisms or could not capture diverse beliefs. By integrating narratives with causal diagrams, we implemented an interactive system that allows users to 1) write narratives to rationalize their perceived causal relationships, 2) visualize their causal models using directed diagrams, and 3) review and utilize others' causal diagrams and narratives. We conducted a user study (N=20) to learn how participants leveraged this integrated approach to externalize their perceived causal models for a given application context. Our results showed that the approach implemented in our tool enabled the externalization of users' causal beliefs (e.g., how and why a causal relationship might occur), allowed blind spots of individuals' causal reasoning to be revealed (e.g., learning new ideas from peers), and inspired their causal reasoning (e.g., revising or adding new causal relationships). We also identified the individual differences in people's causal beliefs and observed the impacts of showing others' causal models when one is building his/her causal diagram and narratives. This work provides practical design implications for developing collaborative tools that facilitate capturing and sharing causal beliefs.