Causal illusions in children when the outcome is frequent

Abstract

Causal illusions occur when people perceive a causal relation between two events that are actually unrelated. One factor that has been shown to promote these mistaken beliefs is the outcome probability. Thus, people tend to overestimate the strength of a causal relation when the potential consequence (i.e. the outcome) occurs with a high probability (outcome-density bias). Given that children and adults differ in several important features involved in causal judgment, including prior knowledge and basic cognitive skills, developmental studies can be considered an outstanding approach to detect and further explore the psychological processes and mechanisms underlying this bias. However, the outcome density bias has been mainly explored in adulthood, and no previous evidence for this bias has been reported in children. Thus, the purpose of this study was to extend outcome-density bias research to childhood. In two experiments, children between 6 and 8 years old were exposed to two similar setups, both showing a non-contingent relation between the potential cause and the outcome. These two scenarios differed only in the probability of the outcome, which could either be high or low. Children judged the relation between the two events to be stronger in the high probability of the outcome setting, revealing that, like adults, they develop causal illusions when the outcome is frequent.

Learning mechanisms underlying accurate and biased contingency judgments.

“…Associative predictions have been tested successfully in many experiments with humans. Consistent with this theory, overestimations of contingency have been shown to be stronger when the outcome occurs frequently (Allan & Jenkins, 1983; Alloy & Abramson, 1979; Buehner, Cheng, & Clifford, 2003; Moreno-Fernández, Blanco, & Matute, 2017; Msetfi, Murphy, Simpson, & Kornbrot, 2005; Simões et al, 2019; Wasserman, Kao, Van Hamme, Katagiri, & Young, 1996). In addition, recent research has also shown that this result is also observed when the outcome is gradual rather than all-or-none (for instance, when we progressively recover from a headache; see Chow, Colagiuri, & Livesey, 2019).…”

Behavior and illusions: a model to study superstition in a participant replacement experiment

“…This position is strongly supported by accumulating evidence that higher levels of activity of one participant are positively correlated with higher estimates of control in the context of noncontingent outcomes (Blanco & Matute, 2015;Blanco, Matute, & Vadillo, 2009Matute, Vadillo, Vegas, & Blanco, 2007). Additionally, a high probability of outcomes is also correlated with the overestimation of personal control (Blanco, Matute, & Vadillo, 2013;Moreno-Fernández, Blanco, & Matute, 2017).…”

The tendency to stop collecting information is linked to illusions of causality

“…Previous research 14 has provided no clear evidence that demographical variables affect data gathering behaviour after controlling for additional factors (i.e., cognitive style). Additionally, causal illusions seem to be general biases that appear regardless of gender, education, and age 27,55 . Nevertheless, future research could take into account these aspects to further describe the effect reported here and find boundary conditions that help us advance our understanding of the relationship between the two biases.…”

“…To assess causal illusions and Jumping to Conclusions, we used two computerized adaptations of widely used tasks: the contingency learning task 53,55,73 and the Beads task 7,12 , respectively. These two adaptations were presented as a web application based on World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards (i.e., HTML, CSS, and JavaScript).…”