Moreno-Fernández María Manuela, Blanco Fernando, Matute Helena
Departamento de Fundamentos y Métodos de la Psicología, University of Deusto, Bilbao, Spain.
PLoS One. 2017 Sep 12;12(9):e0184707. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0184707. eCollection 2017.
Causal illusions occur when people perceive a causal relation between two events that are actually unrelated. One factor that has been shown to promote these mistaken beliefs is the outcome probability. Thus, people tend to overestimate the strength of a causal relation when the potential consequence (i.e. the outcome) occurs with a high probability (outcome-density bias). Given that children and adults differ in several important features involved in causal judgment, including prior knowledge and basic cognitive skills, developmental studies can be considered an outstanding approach to detect and further explore the psychological processes and mechanisms underlying this bias. However, the outcome density bias has been mainly explored in adulthood, and no previous evidence for this bias has been reported in children. Thus, the purpose of this study was to extend outcome-density bias research to childhood. In two experiments, children between 6 and 8 years old were exposed to two similar setups, both showing a non-contingent relation between the potential cause and the outcome. These two scenarios differed only in the probability of the outcome, which could either be high or low. Children judged the relation between the two events to be stronger in the high probability of the outcome setting, revealing that, like adults, they develop causal illusions when the outcome is frequent.
当人们在两个实际上并无关联的事件之间察觉到因果关系时，就会产生因果错觉。已被证明会助长这些错误信念的一个因素是结果概率。因此，当潜在后果（即结果）以高概率出现时，人们往往会高估因果关系的强度（结果密度偏差）。鉴于儿童和成人在因果判断所涉及的几个重要特征上存在差异，包括先验知识和基本认知技能，发展研究可被视为一种杰出的方法，用于检测并进一步探究这种偏差背后的心理过程和机制。然而，结果密度偏差主要是在成年期进行研究的，此前尚无关于儿童存在这种偏差的证据报道。因此，本研究的目的是将结果密度偏差研究扩展至儿童期。在两项实验中，6至8岁的儿童接触了两种相似的情境设置，二者均显示潜在原因与结果之间不存在偶然关系。这两种情境仅在结果概率上有所不同，结果概率要么高要么低。在结果出现概率高的情境中，儿童判断这两个事件之间的关系更强，这表明，与成年人一样，当结果频繁出现时，他们会产生因果错觉。
