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Chapter 11 Causal Effect Heterogeneity Jennie E. Brand and Juli Simon Thomas Abstract Individuals differ not only in background characteristics, often called “pretreatment heterogeneity,” but also in how they respond to a particular treatment, event, or intervention. A principal interaction of interest for questions of selection into treatment and causal inference in the social sciences is between the treatment and the propensity of treatment. Although the importance of “treatment-effect heterogeneity,” so defined, has been widely recognized in the causal inference literature, empirical quantitative social science research has not fully absorbed these lessons. In this chapter, we describe key estimation strategies for the study of heterogeneous treatment effects; we discuss recent research that attends to causal effect heterogeneity, with a focus on the study of effects of education, and what we gain from such attention; and we demonstrate the methods with an example of the effects of college on civic participation. The primary goal of this chapter is to encourage researchers to routinely examine treatment-effect heterogeneity with the same rigor they devote to pretreatment heterogeneity. Introduction As attention to questions of causality increasingly occupies social science research, so too has attention to underlying heterogeneity across individuals or other units of analysis. Individuals differ not only in background characteristics, often called “pretreatment heterogeneity,” but also in how This research made use of facilities and resources at the California Center for Population Research, UCLA, which receives core support from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Grant R24HD041022. Simon Thomas was supported by a UCLA Graduate Summer Research Mentorship program, the Institute for Research on Labor and E