White Peter A
School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales, UK, CF10 3AT.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2008 Jan;34(1):204-18. doi: 10.1037/0278-7393.34.1.204.
When people make causal judgments from contingency information, a principal aim is to account for occurrences of the outcome. When 2 causes are under consideration, the capacity of either to account for occurrences is judged from how likely the cause is to be present when the outcome occurs and from the rate at which the outcome occurs when that cause alone is present, which gives an estimate of the strength of the cause. These propositions are formalized in a weighted averaging model, which successfully predicted several judgmental phenomena not predicted by other models of causal judgment. These include a tendency for judgment of one cause (A) to be reduced as the number of occurrences of when only the other one (B) increases and a tendency for A to receive higher judgments than B if A is better able to account for occurrences than B is even if B has a higher contingency with the outcome than A does. Overshadowing, a tendency for judgments of B to be depressed if A has a higher contingency, is weak or absent when B is better able to account for occurrences than A. Results of several experiments support these and related predictions derived from the accounting for occurrences hypothesis.
当人们根据偶然性信息做出因果判断时，一个主要目的是解释结果的出现情况。当考虑两个原因时，判断其中任何一个原因对结果出现情况的解释能力，是依据结果出现时该原因出现的可能性，以及仅该原因存在时结果出现的频率，这就给出了对该原因强度的一种估计。这些命题在一个加权平均模型中得到了形式化，该模型成功地预测了一些其他因果判断模型未预测到的判断现象。这些现象包括：随着仅另一个原因（B）出现次数的增加，对一个原因（A）的判断倾向于降低；如果A比B更能解释结果的出现情况，那么即使B与结果的偶然性比A更高，A的判断也会比B更高。遮蔽效应是指，如果A的偶然性更高，B的判断就会倾向于降低，当B比A更能解释结果的出现情况时，这种效应就很微弱或不存在。几个实验的结果支持了这些以及从解释结果出现情况假设推导出来的相关预测。
