title: Illusions of causality: how they bias our everyday thinking and how they could be reduced.
abstract: Illusions of causality occur when people develop the belief that there is a causal connection between two events that are actually unrelated. Such illusions have been proposed to underlie pseudoscience and superstitious thinking, sometimes leading to disastrous consequences in relation to critical life areas, such as health, finances, and wellbeing. Like optical illusions, they can occur for anyone under well-known conditions. Scientific thinking is the best possible safeguard against them, but it does not come intuitively and needs to be taught. Teaching how to think scientifically should benefit from better understanding of the illusion of causality. In this article, we review experiments that our group has conducted on the illusion of causality during the last 20 years. We discuss how research on the illusion of causality can contribute to the teaching of scientific thinking and how scientific thinking can reduce illusion.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Fundamentos y Métodos de la Psicología, Universidad de Deusto , Bilbao, Spain.
authors.forename: Helena
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Matute
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Fundamentos y Métodos de la Psicología, Universidad de Deusto , Bilbao, Spain.
authors.forename: Fernando
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Blanco
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Fundamentos y Métodos de la Psicología, Universidad de Deusto , Bilbao, Spain.
authors.forename: Ion
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Yarritu
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Fundamentos y Métodos de la Psicología, Universidad de Deusto , Bilbao, Spain.
authors.forename: Marcos
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Díaz-Lago
authors.affiliation: Primary Care and Public Health Sciences, King's College London , London, UK.
authors.forename: Miguel A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Vadillo
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Psicología Básica, Universitat de Barcelona , Barcelona, Spain ; EventLab, Departamento de Personalidad, Evaluación y Tratamiento Psicológico, Universitat de Barcelona , Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: Itxaso
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Barberia
keywords: causal learning; cognitive biases; contingency judgment; illusion of causality; illusion of control; science teaching; scientific methods; scientific thinking