Abstract
Beliefs about cause and effect, including health beliefs, are thought to be related to the frequency of the target outcome (e.g., health recovery) occurring when the putative cause is present and when it is absent (treatment administered vs. no treatment); this is known as contingency learning. However, it is unclear whether unvalidated health beliefs, where there is no evidence of cause–effect contingency, are also influenced by the subjective perception of a meaningful contingency between events. In a survey, respondents were asked to judge a range of health beliefs and estimate the probability of the target outcome occurring with and without the putative cause present. Overall, we found evidence that causal beliefs are related to perceived cause–effect contingency. Interestingly, beliefs that were not predicted by perceived contingency were meaningfully related to scores on the paranormal belief scale. These findings suggest heterogeneity in pseudoscientific health beliefs and the need to tailor intervention strategies according to underlying causes.
Highlights
It is unclear whether unvalidated health beliefs, where there is no evidence of cause–effect contingency, are influenced by the subjective perception of a meaningful contingency between events
Of the remaining eight target associations, Shapiro–Wilk test of normality revealed that the distribution of causal ratings for most topic areas were not normally distributed, with the exception of two complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) beliefs: chiropractic therapy is an effective treatment for back pain (p = 0.053), and acupuncture is an effective treatment for prolonged pain (p = 0.066)
We found average causal belief ratings to be strongest for smoking–breathing problems and exercise–lifespan, and weakest for controversial beliefs such as vaccination–autism, wind turbine syndrome, and WIFI–cancer
Summary
It is unclear whether unvalidated health beliefs, where there is no evidence of cause–effect contingency, are influenced by the subjective perception of a meaningful contingency between events. Beliefs that were not predicted by perceived contingency were meaningfully related to scores on the paranormal belief scale These findings suggest heterogeneity in pseudoscientific health beliefs and the need to tailor intervention strategies according to underlying causes. Contingency learning is proposed to be a key mechanism of causal belief formation [2]. It involves the individual making causal judgments based on experiencing or observing the relationship between two events. The researchers can compare the participant’s beliefs about the relationship between the events with the objective relationship In these tasks, people are generally good at accurately judging causal relationships when there is a genuine objective relationship between. People are much worse at these tasks when no genuine relationship exists between the events (e.g., illusory causation, see [5] for a review) often tending to overestimate the causal relationship, pointing to systematic biases in contingency learning and causal belief formation
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