does the why tell us the when traditional approaches to human causal reasoning assume that the perception of temporal order informs judgments of causal structure in this article we present two experiments in which people followed the opposite inferential route perceptual judgments of temporal order were instead influenced by causal beliefs by letting participants freely interact with a softwarebased physics world we induced stable causal beliefs that subsequently determined participants reported temporal order of events even when this led to a reversal of the objective temporal order we argue that for short timescales even when temporalresolution capabilities suffice the perception of temporal order is distorted to fit existing causal beliefs