The influence of the number of relevant causes on the processing of covariation information in causal reasoning.
Research on causal reasoning has focused on the influence of covariation between candidate causes and effects on causal judgments. We suggest that the type of covariation information to which people attend is affected by the task being performed. For this, we manipulated the test questions for the evaluation of contingency information and observed its influence on both contingency learning and subsequent causal selections. When people select one cause related to an effect, they focus on conditional contingencies assuming the absence of alternative causes. When people select two causes related to an effect, they focus on conditional contingencies assuming the presence of alternative causes. We demonstrated this use of contingency information in four experiments.
Department of Psychology, Ajou University, Suwon, Republic of Korea. kyungilkim@ajou.ac.kr.
Kyungil
K
Kim
Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA.
Arthur B
AB
Markman
Department of Psychology, Kyungnam University, Changwon, Republic of Korea.
Tae Hoon
TH
Kim
D001245:Association Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D015984:Causality; D003657:Decision Making / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D013850:Thinking; D055815:Young Adult
Causal reasoning; Conditional contingency; Covariation; Task effect