Catena Andrés, Maldonado Antonio, Perales José C, Cándido Antonio
Departamento de Psicología Experimental y Fisiología del Comportamiento, Facultad de Psicologia, Universidad de Granada, Campus de Cartuja, Granada, Spain.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2008 Jun;128(2):339-49. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2008.03.005. Epub 2008 Apr 28.
The main aim of this work was to show the impact of preexisting causal beliefs on causal induction from cause-effect co-occurrence information, when several cues compete with each other for predicting the same effect. Two different causal scenarios -- one social (a), the other medical (b) -- were used to check the generality of the effects. In Experiments 1a and 1b, participants were provided information on the co-occurrence of a two-cause compound and an effect, but not about the potential relationship between each cause by its own and the effect. As expected, prior beliefs -- induced by means of instructions -- strongly modulated the causal strength assigned to each element of the compound. In Experiments 2a and 2b, covariation evidence was provided, not only about the predictive value of the two-cause compound, but also about one of the elements of the compound. When this evidence was available, prior beliefs had less impact on judgments, and these were mostly guided by the relative predictive value of the cue. These results demonstrate the involvement of inferential integrative mechanisms in the generation of causal knowledge and show that single covariation detection mechanisms -- either rule-based or associative -- are insufficient to account for human causal judgment. At the same time, the fact that the power of new covariational evidence to change prior beliefs depended on the availability of information on the relative (conditional) predictive value of the target candidate cause suggests that causal knowledge derived from information on causal mechanisms and from covariation probably share a common representational basis.
这项工作的主要目的是，当多个线索相互竞争以预测同一结果时，展示预先存在的因果信念对基于因果共现信息进行的因果归纳的影响。使用了两种不同的因果场景——一个是社会场景（a），另一个是医学场景（b）——来检验这些效应的普遍性。在实验1a和1b中，向参与者提供了关于一个双原因复合体和一个结果的共现信息，但没有提供关于每个原因自身与结果之间潜在关系的信息。正如预期的那样，通过指令诱导的先验信念强烈地调节了赋予复合体每个元素的因果强度。在实验2a和2b中，不仅提供了关于双原因复合体预测价值的协变证据，还提供了关于复合体中一个元素的协变证据。当有这个证据时，先验信念对判断的影响较小，并且这些判断大多由线索的相对预测价值引导。这些结果证明了推理整合机制在因果知识生成中的参与，并表明单一的协变检测机制——无论是基于规则的还是联想的——都不足以解释人类的因果判断。同时，新的协变证据改变先验信念的能力取决于关于目标候选原因相对（条件）预测价值的信息的可用性，这一事实表明，从因果机制信息和协变中获得的因果知识可能共享一个共同的表征基础。
