The Ladder of Causation

The Ladder of Causation is a way to understand different levels of reasoning about why things happen. The first level is association—spotting patterns or correlations between events (e.g., ice cream sales and heat). The second involves interventions—asking what happens if we change something (e.g., if we boost advertising, will sales increase?). The third level is counterfactuals—considering what could have happened under different circumstances (e.g., if a customer hadn’t seen the ad, would they have bought?). This hierarchy helps us move from recognizing patterns to predicting and explaining causal relationships.