Positive and negative implications of the causal illusion

When is a causal illusion an illusion? Separating discriminability and bias in human contingency judgements

Humans often behave as if unrelated events are causally related. As the name suggests, such causal illusions imply failures to detect the absence of a causal relation. Taking a signal detection approach, we asked whether causal illusions indeed reflect failures of discriminability, or whether they reflect a general bias to behave as if events are causally related. Participants responded in a discrete trial procedure in which point gains, point losses, or no change in points occurred dependently on or independently of responding. Participants reported whether each event was response-dependent or response-independent by choosing between two stimuli, one corresponding to reporting "I did it" and the other to "I didn't do it." Overall, participants responded accurately in about 80% of trials and were biased to report that events depended on responding. This bias was strongest after point gains and for higher-performing participants. Such differences in event-specific biases were not related to response rates; instead, they appear to reflect more fundamental differences in the effects of appetitive and aversive events. These findings demonstrate that people can judge causality relatively well, but are biased to attribute events to their own behaviour, particularly when those events are desirable. This highlights discriminability and bias as separable aspects of causal learning, and suggests that some causal illusions may not really be "illusions" at all-they may simply reflect a bias to report causal relations.

Does perceptual disfluency affect the illusion of causality?

When a subjective experience of difficulty is associated with a mental task, people tend to engage in systematic and deliberative reasoning, which can reduce the usage of intuitive and effortless thinking that gives rise to cognitive biases. One such bias is the illusion of causality, where people perceive a causal link between two unrelated events. In 2019, Díaz-Lago and Matute found that a superficial perceptual feature of the task could modulate the magnitude of the illusion (i.e., a hard-to-read font led to a decrease in the magnitude of the illusion). The present study explored the generalisability of the idea that perceptual disfluency can lead to a decrease in the magnitude of the illusion. In the first experiment, we tested whether a physical-perceptual manipulation of the stimuli, specifically the contrast between the written text and the background, could modulate the illusion in a contingency learning task. The results of the online experiment (N = 200) showed no effect of contrast on the magnitude of the illusion, despite our manipulation having successfully induced task fluency or disfluency. Building upon this null result, our second experiment (N = 100) focused on manipulating the font type, in an attempt to replicate the results obtained by Díaz-Lago and Matute. In contrast to their findings, we found no discernible effect of font type on the magnitude of the illusion, even though this manipulation also effectively induced variations in task fluency or disfluency. These results underscore the notion that not all categories of (dis)fluency in cognitive processing wield a modulatory influence on cognitive biases, and they call for a re-evaluation and a more precise delineation of the (dis)fluency construct.

Exploring the influence of self-identification on perceptual judgments of physical and social causality

People tend to overestimate the causal contribution of the self to the observed outcome in various situations, a cognitive bias known as the 'illusion of control.' This study delves into whether this cognitive bias impacts causality judgments in animations depicting physical and social causal interactions. In two experiments, participants were instructed to associate themselves and a hypothetical stranger identity with two geometrical shapes (a circle and a square). Subsequently, they viewed animations portraying these shapes assuming the roles of agent and patient in causal interactions. Within one block, the shape related to the self served as the agent, while the shape associated with the stranger played the role of the patient. Conversely, in the other block, the identity-role association was reversed. We posited that the perception of the self as a causal agent might influence explicit judgments of physical and social causality. Experiment 1 demonstrated that physical causality ratings were solely shaped by kinematic cues. In Experiment 2, emphasising social causality, the dominance of kinematic parameters was confirmed. Therefore, contrary to the hypothesis anticipating diminished causality ratings with specific identity-role associations, results indicated negligible impact of our manipulation. The study contributes to understanding the interplay between kinematic and non-kinematic cues in human causal reasoning. It suggests that explicit judgments of causality in simple animations primarily rely on low-level kinematic cues, with the cognitive bias of overestimating the self's contribution playing a negligible role.

Excessive teleological thinking is driven by aberrant associations and not by failure of reasoning

Teleological thought - the tendency to ascribe purpose to objects and events - is useful in some cases (encouraging explanation-seeking), but harmful in others (fueling delusions and conspiracy theories). What drives excessive and maladaptive teleological thinking? In causal learning, there is a fundamental distinction between associative learning versus learning via propositional mechanisms. Here, we propose that directly contrasting the contributions of these two pathways can elucidate the roots of excess teleology. We modified a causal learning task such that we could encourage associative versus propositional mechanisms in different instances. Across three experiments (total N = 600), teleological tendencies were correlated with delusion-like ideas and uniquely explained by aberrant associative learning, but not by learning via propositional rules. Computational modeling suggested that the relationship between associative learning and teleological thinking can be explained by excessive prediction errors that imbue random events with more significance - providing a new understanding for how humans make meaning of lived events.

Scarcity affects cognitive biases: The case of the illusion of causality

Previous research indicates that economic scarcity affects people's judgments, decisions, and cognition in a variety of contexts, and with various consequences. We hypothesized that scarcity could sometimes reduce cognitive biases. Specifically, it could reduce the causal illusion, a cognitive bias that is at the heart of superstitions and irrational thoughts, and consists of believing that two events are causally connected when they are not. In three experiments, participants played the role of doctors deciding whether to administer a drug to a series of patients. The drug was ineffective, because the percentage of patients recovering was identical regardless of whether they took the drug. We manipulated the budget available to buy the drugs, tough all participants had enough for all their patients. Even so, participants in the scarce group reduced the use of the drug and showed a lower causal illusion than participants in the wealthy group. Experiments 2 and 3 added a phase in which the budget changed. Participants who transitioned from scarcity to wealth exhibited a reduced use of resources and a lower causal illusion, whereas participants transitioning from wealth to scarcity were unaffected by their previous history.

Causal illusions in the classroom: how the distribution of student outcomes can promote false instructional beliefs

Teachers sometimes believe in the efficacy of instructional practices that have little empirical support. These beliefs have proven difficult to efface despite strong challenges to their evidentiary basis. Teachers typically develop causal beliefs about the efficacy of instructional practices by inferring their effect on students’ academic performance. Here, we evaluate whether causal inferences about instructional practices are susceptible to an outcome density effect using a contingency learning task. In a series of six experiments, participants were ostensibly presented with students’ assessment outcomes, some of whom had supposedly received teaching via a novel technique and some of whom supposedly received ordinary instruction. The distributions of the assessment outcomes was manipulated to either have frequent positive outcomes (high outcome density condition) or infrequent positive outcomes (low outcome density condition). For both continuous and categorical assessment outcomes, participants in the high outcome density condition rated the novel instructional technique as effective, despite the fact that it either had no effect or had a negative effect on outcomes, while the participants in the low outcome density condition did not. These results suggest that when base rates of performance are high, participants may be particularly susceptible to drawing inaccurate inferences about the efficacy of instructional practices.

A hard to read font reduces the causality bias

Previous studies have demonstrated that fluency affects judgment and decision-making. The purpose of the present research was to investigate the effect of perceptual fluency in a causal learning task that usually induces an illusion of causality in non-contingent conditions. We predicted that a reduction of fluency could improve accuracy in the detection of non-contingency and, therefore, could be used to debias illusory perceptions of causality. Participants were randomly assigned to either an easy-to-read or a hard-to-read condition. Our results showed a strong bias (i.e., overestimation) of causality in those participants who performed the non-contingent task in the easy-to-read font, which replicated the standard causality bias effect. This effect was reduced when the same task was presented in a hard-to-read font. Overall, our results provide evidence for a reduction of the causality bias when presenting the problem in a hard-to-read font. This suggests that perceptual fluency affects causal judgments.

Base-rate expectations modulate the causal illusion

Previous research revealed that people's judgments of causality between a target cause and an outcome in null contingency settings can be biased by various factors, leading to causal illusions (i.e., incorrectly reporting a causal relationship where there is none). In two experiments, we examined whether this causal illusion is sensitive to prior expectations about base-rates. Thus, we pretrained participants to expect either a high outcome base-rate (Experiment 1) or a low outcome base-rate (Experiment 2). This pretraining was followed by a standard contingency task in which the target cause and the outcome were not contingent with each other (i.e., there was no causal relation between them). Subsequent causal judgments were affected by the pretraining: When the outcome base-rate was expected to be high, the causal illusion was reduced, and the opposite was observed when the outcome base-rate was expected to be low. The results are discussed in the light of several explanatory accounts (associative and computational). A rational account of contingency learning based on the evidential value of information can predict our findings.

Bridging the divide between causal illusions in the laboratory and the real world: the effects of outcome density with a variable continuous outcome

Illusory causation refers to a consistent error in human learning in which the learner develops a false belief that two unrelated events are causally associated. Laboratory studies usually demonstrate illusory causation by presenting two events-a cue (e.g., drug treatment) and a discrete outcome (e.g., patient has recovered from illness)-probabilistically across many trials such that the presence of the cue does not alter the probability of the outcome. Illusory causation in these studies is further augmented when the base rate of the outcome is high, a characteristic known as the outcome density effect. Illusory causation and the outcome density effect provide laboratory models of false beliefs that emerge in everyday life. However, unlike laboratory research, the real-world beliefs to which illusory causation is most applicable (e.g., ineffective health therapies) often involve consequences that are not readily classified in a discrete or binary manner. This study used a causal learning task framed as a medical trial to investigate whether similar outcome density effects emerged when using continuous outcomes. Across two experiments, participants observed outcomes that were either likely to be relatively low (low outcome density) or likely to be relatively high (high outcome density) along a numerical scale from 0 (no health improvement) to 100 (full recovery). In Experiment 1, a bimodal distribution of outcome magnitudes, incorporating variance around a high and low modal value, produced illusory causation and outcome density effects equivalent to a condition with two fixed outcome values. In Experiment 2, the outcome density effect was evident when using unimodal skewed distributions of outcomes that contained more ambiguous values around the midpoint of the scale. Together, these findings provide empirical support for the relevance of the outcome density bias to real-world situations in which outcomes are not binary but occur to differing degrees. This has implications for the way in which we apply our understanding of causal illusions in the laboratory to the development of false beliefs in everyday life.

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

The notion of superstitious behavior can provide a basic background for understanding such notions as illusions and beliefs. The present study investigated the social mechanism of the transmission of superstitious behavior in an experiment that utilized participant replacement. The sample was composed of a total of 38 participants. Participants performed a task on a computer: they could click a colored rectangle using the mouse. When the rectangle was in a particular color, the participants received points independently of their behavior (variable time schedule). When the color of the rectangle was changed, no points were presented (extinction). Under an Individual Exposure condition, ten participants worked alone on the task. Other participants were exposed to the same experimental task under a Social Exposure condition, in which each participant first learned by observation and then worked on the task in a participant replacement (chain) procedure. The first participant in each chain in the Social Exposure condition was a confederate who worked on the task "superstitiously," clicking the rectangle when points were presented. Superstitious responding was transmitted because of the behavior of the confederate. This also influenced estimates of personal control. These findings suggest that social learning can facilitate the acquisition and maintenance of superstitious behavior and the illusion of control. Our data also suggest that superstitious behavior and the illusion of control may involve similar learning principles.

Causal Illusions in the Service of Political Attitudes in Spain and the United Kingdom

The causal illusion is a cognitive bias that results in the perception of causality where there is no supporting evidence. We show that people selectively exhibit the bias, especially in those situations where it favors their current worldview as revealed by their political orientation. In our two experiments (one conducted in Spain and one conducted in the United Kingdom), participants who self-positioned themselves on the ideological left formed the illusion that a left-wing ruling party was more successful in improving city indicators than a right-wing party, while participants on the ideological right tended to show the opposite pattern. In sum, despite the fact that the same information was presented to all participants, people developed the causal illusion bias selectively, providing very different interpretations that aligned with their previous attitudes. This result occurs in situations where participants inspect the relationship between the government's actions and positive outcomes (improving city indicators) but not when the outcomes are negative (worsening city indicators).

Causal illusions in children when the outcome is frequent

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.