title: The effect of causal knowledge on judgments of the likelihood of unknown features.
abstract: People frequently infer unknown aspects of anentity based on their knowledge about that entity. The current study reports a novel phenomenon, an inductive bias people have in making such inferences. Up on learning that one symptom causes another in a person, both undergraduate students (Experiment 1) and clinicians (Experiment 2) judged that an unknown feature associated with the cause-symptom was more likely to be present in that person than an unknown feature associated with the effect-symptom. Thus, these findings suggest a specific mechanism in which causal explanations influence one's representation of and inferences about an entity. Implications for clinical reasoning and associative models of conceptual knowledge are discussed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520-8205, USA. caroline.proctor@yale.edu
authors.forename: Caroline
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Procror
authors.forename: Woo-Kyoung
authors.initials: WK
authors.lastname: Ahn
mesh_terms: D015984:Causality; D003071:Cognition; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires