Abstract
Previous research revealed that people’s judgments of causality between a target cause and an outcome in null contingency settings can be biased by various factors, leading to causal illusions (i.e., incorrectly reporting a causal relationship where there is none). In two experiments, we examined whether this causal illusion is sensitive to prior expectations about base-rates. Thus, we pretrained participants to expect either a high outcome base-rate (Experiment 1) or a low outcome base-rate (Experiment 2). This pretraining was followed by a standard contingency task in which the target cause and the outcome were not contingent with each other (i.e., there was no causal relation between them). Subsequent causal judgments were affected by the pretraining: When the outcome base-rate was expected to be high, the causal illusion was reduced, and the opposite was observed when the outcome base-rate was expected to be low. The results are discussed in the light of several explanatory accounts (associative and computational). A rational account of contingency learning based on the evidential value of information can predict our findings.
Highlights
Recent research has investigated the so-called "causal illusion" or "illusion of causality", a phenomenon that consists in believing that a causal relation exists between a potential cause, C, and an outcome, O, when they are causally unrelated but coincide frequently [1]
We have reported two experiments in which the outcome base-rate expectations were successfully manipulated in opposite directions (Experiment 1 vs. Experiment 2). These expectations led to a modulation of the causal illusion in the causal judgments that is compatible with a rational account of cell information usage [17] that translates to differential weighting of the four trial types when estimating causality
Previous research has proposed that causal illusions such as those reported here entail both good and bad consequences for people [57]
Summary
Recent research has investigated the so-called "causal illusion" or "illusion of causality", a phenomenon that consists in believing that a causal relation exists between a potential cause, C, and an outcome, O, when they are causally unrelated but coincide frequently [1]. A relevant amount of evidence has been collected in computer tasks that used meaningful scenarios, such as the typical medicine-evaluation task, in which participants are asked to judge the effectiveness of a medicine in treating a fictitious disease. These experiments have revealed important information that can be used to alleviate the undesired effects of the causal illusion in real life situations, such as pseudomedicine usage or self-medication [7].
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