Frequently, you may have had to search for causes of important events. The demand for such a search may have arisen from a disaster, perhaps an accident which should have been avoidable. (1) Yet you have searched, too, for the causes leading to triumphs: your championship team would like to repeat its winning record in the succeeding year: a friend has overcome a handicap which now confronts you.
(2) In these instances, you probably have not written down whatever causes you found, though if the search were sufficiently serious, a written record may have been essential. You thus discovered the usefulness of the cause and effect pattern. You saw that it can be especially helpful in the process of analysis, in answering the question why.
Of what does the cause and effect pattern consist? (3) To answer this, you may first look for some immediate causes and confine yourself to their presentation. For example, a young man’s driver’s license is suspended for a month. He has been involved in a series of traffic violations, exceeding the number which the court believes a good driver may have recorded against him. The immediate causes, then, are the violations.
A second way to proceed is to move from immediate causes to ultimate causes. To extend the above case, the driver may not know how to drive a car well, never having taken a driver education course. He may have been issued a license after merely passing a test for which he was not really prepared. Moreover, he may be satisfying some inner need by his careless driving. (4) The search for ultimate causes can be endless, and it should not be pursued beyond the requirements established by the search for the answer to the why of a particular situation.
In searching for causes, you must avoid false reasoning. That is, you must not mistake a previous or a concurrent event as a cause. (5) Such reasoning forms the basis of superstitions such as the familiar one which claims that a black cat crossing one’s path will be responsible for misfortune. Many other factors must be considered in addition to the black cat.
