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

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 δ P 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 δ P 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.