Who Got the Ball Rolling? Jurors and Causal Chains
By Natalie Gordon, M.A., Ph.D. student, DOAR analyst When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, many Americans asked—how did this happen? Some attributed it to James Comey’s decision to re-open the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails just days earlier, while others looked farther back in time to Trump’s success on the Apprentice. This investigation into what led Trump to become President exemplifies the human inclination to create causal chains when trying to understand events. And we do this all the time, whether we’re trying to understand public events like the space shuttle disaster or the 9/11 attack, or private