Hayes Brett K, Hawkins Guy E, Newell Ben R
School of Psychology, University of New South Wales.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2016 May;42(5):723-39. doi: 10.1037/xlm0000205. Epub 2015 Nov 16.
Four experiments examined the locus of impact of causal knowledge on consideration of alternative hypotheses in judgments under uncertainty. Two possible loci were examined; overcoming neglect of the alternative when developing a representation of a judgment problem and improving utilization of statistics associated with the alternative hypothesis. In Experiment 1, participants could search for information about the various components of Bayes's rule in a diagnostic problem. A majority failed to spontaneously search for information about an alternative hypothesis, but this bias was reduced when a specific alternative hypothesis was mentioned before search. No change in search patterns was found when a generic alternative cause was mentioned. Experiments 2a and 2b broadly replicated these patterns when participants rated or made binary judgments about the relevance of each of the Bayesian components. In contrast, Experiment 3 showed that when participants were given the likelihood of the data given a focal hypothesis p(D|H) and an alternative hypothesis p(D|¬H), they gave estimates of p(H|D) that were consistent with Bayesian principles. Additional causal knowledge had relatively little impact on such judgments. These results show that causal knowledge primarily affects neglect of the alternative hypothesis at the initial stage of problem representation. (PsycINFO Database Record
四项实验研究了因果知识在不确定性判断中对备择假设考量的影响位点。研究考察了两个可能的影响位点；一是在构建判断问题的表征时克服对备择假设的忽视，二是提高与备择假设相关统计信息的利用率。在实验1中，参与者可以在一个诊断问题中搜索关于贝叶斯规则各个组成部分的信息。大多数人未能自发地搜索关于备择假设的信息，但当在搜索前提及一个特定的备择假设时，这种偏差会减小。当提及一个一般性的备择原因时，未发现搜索模式有变化。当参与者对贝叶斯各组成部分的相关性进行评分或做出二元判断时，实验2a和2b大致重复了这些模式。相比之下，实验3表明，当向参与者提供给定焦点假设p(D|H)和备择假设p(D|¬H)时的数据似然性时，他们对p(H|D)的估计符合贝叶斯原则。额外的因果知识对这类判断的影响相对较小。这些结果表明，因果知识主要在问题表征的初始阶段影响对备择假设的忽视。（《心理学文摘数据库记录》
