In three experiments, we examined how reasoners' preexisting beliefs about causal relations constrained their evaluation of covariation-based empirical evidence. Reasoners were presented with causal candidates that were a priori rated to be either believable or unbelievable, as well as information regarding the degree to which the cause and the effect covaried. Several findings supported the co...

Inductive reasoning allows us to go beyond the target hypothesis and capitalize on prior knowledge. Past research has shown that both the similarity of categories and specific knowledge about causal relations affect inductive plausibility. We go one step further and focus on the role of abstract causal schemas about main effects and interactions. Two experiments show that both prior assumptions...

Causal knowledge can be based on acquired information about the statistical relationship (covariation) between a cause and effect or on knowledge of the mechanism by which causal power is transmitted between the cause and effect. A key issue is the functional significance of this distinction. In this article, we review recent research in which the influence of covariational evidence on prior be...

In many economic contexts, an elusive variable of interest is the agent’s belief about relevant events, e.g. about other agents’ behavior. A growing number of surveys and experiments ask participants to state beliefs explicitly but little is known about the causal relation between beliefs and other behavioral variables. This paper discusses the possibility of creating exogenous instrumental var...

The current study investigated the relationship between just world beliefs and stigmatizing attitudes toward eating disorders and obesity. Further, the associations between stigma and causal beliefs, and between stigma and acquaintance with these conditions, were examined. Participants (n = 447) read four vignettes describing an individual with anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating di...

BACKGROUND British South Asians have a higher incidence of diabetes and poorer health outcomes compared to the general UK population. Beliefs about diabetes are known to play an important role in self-management, yet little is known about the sociocultural context in shaping beliefs. This study aimed to explore the influence of sociocultural context on illness beliefs and diabetes self-manageme...

The main aim of this work was to look for cognitive biases in human inference of causal relationships in order to emphasize the psychological processes that modulate causal learning. From the effect of the judgment frequency, this work presents subsequent research on cue competition (overshadowing, blocking, and super-conditioning effects) showing that the strength of prior beliefs and new evid...

Much of human cognition and activity depends on causal beliefs and reasoning. In psychological research on human causal learning and inference, we usually suppose that we have a set of binary potential causes, C1, ..., Cn, and a known binary effect, E, all typically present-absent values of a property or event. The differentiation into potential causes and effect is made on the basis of externa...

OBJECTIVE Somatic causal illness attributions are being considered as potential positive criteria for somatoform disorders (SFDs) in DSM-V. The aim of this study was to investigate whether patients diagnosed with SFDs tend towards a predominantly somatic attribution style. METHODS We compared the causal illness attributions of 48 SFD and 149 non-somatoform disorder patients, in a sample of pa...

The present paper examines the interplay between causal reasoning and decision making. We use a repeated decision making paradigm to investigate how people adapt their choice behavior when being confronted with changes in the decision environment. We argue that people are sensitive to the causal texture of a decision problem and adjust their choice behavior in accordance with their causal belie...