Revising Causal Beliefs

The aim of our studies is to examine how contradictions affect causal beliefs. For example, the discovery that your colleague Mark who has been following diet A suffers from iron deficiency may lead you to revise your belief that diet A provides a sufficient supply of iron. Would you also revise your belief that it causes you to lose weight? Experiment 1 shows that our belief that Mark will lose weight is reduced after encountering the contradiction. Experiment 2 shows that people are also less likely to believe that others will lose weight. The results suggest that people resolve contradictions by generating explanations that revise their causal model.