Four Causal Roles
Four physical relationships. Each one is a different way of being responsible for something.
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Accelerate, hold up, tilt towards, or make inevitable. Four different jobs, and only two of them are causing anything.
Name the exact part a cause plays, and keep causes separate from logical links.
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Six factors, all described as causing the same outcome. Only two of them are causes at all.
A city's cycling rate triples over ten years. Here are six things a report might say caused it.
- A change in the law caused it.
- Sustained funding for cycle lanes caused it.
- A flat city centre caused it.
- A fuel price spike in year two caused it.
- Tripling the rate caused more bike parking to be needed.
- Calling it a "recovery" caused people to assume cycling had once been higher.
All six sentences are grammatical, and cause is not wrong in any of them.
But those six factors are doing six different things, and two of them are not causing anything at all.
The four roles in detail, including the two verbs that claim nothing about causation and the one that claims less than people think.
Both produce a change, and they differ on whether the change was already under way.
induce brings a state about from a standing start. The drug induces drowsiness, the shortage induced a change in policy. It is direct and slightly clinical, and it claims sufficiency: the factor was enough.
catalyse speeds up something already possible or already beginning. This is borrowed from chemistry, where a catalyst accelerates a reaction without being consumed by it and without being one of the ingredients. Carried into policy prose, that metaphor survives:
Cheap credit catalysed a building boom.
That says the boom had its own causes and cheap credit made it faster. It is a weaker and more honest claim than caused, and candidates use it as if it were a stronger one.
(British spelling catalyse*; American* catalyze*. Either is accepted.)*
Four physical relationships. Each one is a different way of being responsible for something.
Accelerate, hold up, tilt towards, or make inevitable. Four different jobs, and only two of them are causing anything.
Twelve relationships. Six are things that happen and six are things that follow — and the second six split again.
Sort each item into the correct category
Three chains. Name the role before you name the verb — and once, find you cannot name the role at all.
Chain 1
The relationship: reliable childcare does not make a parent return to work, but no parent with a young child can return without it.
Candidates: causes / underpins
Step 1 — Which role is this: trigger, foundation, tendency, or logic?
Step 2 — Therefore the expert writes: Reliable childcare the return to work of parents with young children.
Chain 2
The relationship: if a scheme is genuinely universal, then by definition nobody has been excluded from it. No observation is needed and none could contradict it.
Candidates: causes / entails
Step 1 — Which role is this, and what tells you?
Step 2 — Therefore the expert writes: A universal scheme that nobody is excluded from it.
Chain 3
The relationship: cycling rates rose in the four years after the city widened its pavements. Three other things also changed in that period, and nobody has separated them.
Candidates: catalysed / contributed to
Step 1 — Can you name the role this factor played?
Step 2 — Therefore the expert writes: Wider pavements may have the rise in cycling.