We have several suggestions for improvement that we would like to offer the authors. First we present several general and methodological points, and we then move on to discuss the rationale and relevance of the study.
Methodologically, first, the used vignette in the study is on smoking and lung cancer. We wonder whether using this example, which has a strong social/historical/cultural context of being causal, is appropriate for the point the authors are trying to make. The explanation might prime this and create stronger effects than other associations. We wonder whether using a different vignette would have produced different results (e.g., the relation between anxiety and depression or between drug abuse and impulsivity, which have less clear causal directions, or even the association between, say, the number of storks in a given country and its correlation with the number of babies born).