Perceiving a strong causal relation in a weak contingency: further investigation of the evidential evaluation model of causal judgement.

Full Abstract

Contingency information is information about the occurrence or nonoccurrence of a certain effect in the presence or absence of a candidate cause. An objective measure of contingency is the deltaP rule, which involves subtracting the probability of occurrence of an effect when a causal candidate is absent from the probability of occurrence of the effect when the candidate is present. Causal judgements conform closely to deltaP but deviate from it under certain circumstances. Three experiments show that such deviations can be predicted by a model of causal judgement that has two components:
a rule of evidence, that causal judgement is a function of the proportion of relevant instances that are judged to be confirmatory for the causal candidate, and a tendency for information about instances in which the candidate is present to have greater effect on judgement than instances in which the candidate is absent. Two experiments demonstrate how this model accounts for some recently published findings. A third experiment shows that it is possible to use the model to predict the occurrence of high causal judgements when the objective contingency is close to zero.

Learn Faster Today Improve your study skills

Author information

Author/s: White, Peter A (PA);

Affiliation: School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Wales, UK. whitepa(-atsign-)cardiff.ac.uk

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article

Journal: The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology (Q J Exp Psychol A), published in England. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2002-Jan; vol 55 (issue 1) : pp 97-114

Dates: Created 2002/03/04; Completed 2002/05/07; Revised 2004/11/17;

PMID: 11873858, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 12/26/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

External Links for this article (including full text providers, if available):

Click Electronic Full-text Provider Links to see options for finding the electronic full text links to this article. Note there may be a subscription or fee required for access to the full text. See our FAQ for information on finding FREE full text articles.

This article may also be located in paper journal collections available in many libraries. Use the Journal and Publication Information above to find the full article.

MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Attitude to Health
Humans

Judgment
Random Allocation

These are the highest related articles currently in the database:

See 100+ related articles.