Kognitive Verarbeitungsprozesse beim kausalen Urteilen und Entscheiden

Abstract

The present work deals with cognitive processes that take place when people use their causal knowledge in judgment and decision making tasks. For this purpose it first will be argued that based on the special characteristics of causal relations, it is reasonable to assume causal thinking to be a distinct form of human thinking. Subsequently, several dual-process theories will be evaluated with respect to their ability to consider different aspects of causal thinking. Some of these theories assume that slow, conscious, and controlled type 2-processes are necessary in causal judgment and decision making. On the other hand, some dual-process approaches assume fast, unconscious, and automatic type 1-processes to be sufficient for processing causal information. Next, several theories on causal thinking are presented and integrated into the dual-process debate. In this way, four groups of theories are identified: Some theories are consistent with judgments on the basis of type 1-processes while for others the presence of type 2-processes is necessary. Furthermore, there are theories that consider both types of processes and theories that are agnostic with respect to cognitive processes in causal thinking. The evaluation indicates a relationship between the tasks examined in the different causal theories and the classification of the processes assumed. On the basis of the theoretical analysis two hypotheses are derived and tested within an experimental paradigm developed for this purpose. Hypothesis 1 states that causal categorization judgments can be made on the basis of type 1-processes. Hypothesis 2, however, states that type 2-processes are necessary for judgments about causal interventions. The hypotheses are empirically tested in 5 experiments. The results partly confirm hypothesis 1 while hypothesis 2 cannot be judged as confirmed. Nevertheless, the experiments show that the type of task does have an influence on cognitive processing. However, there are also hints for other influences on cognitive processes, but the experimental paradigm used in the experiments was not suitable to control them in an adequate way. In sum, the experiments show that different cognitive processes are at work when people deal with causal information and that causal judgments can be made on the basis of type 1-processing.