Blanco Fernando, Gómez-Fortes Braulio, Matute Helena
Departamento de Fundamentos y Métodos de la Psicología, University of Deusto, Bilbao, Spain.
Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y Humanas, University of Deusto, Bilbao, Spain.
Front Psychol. 2018 Jun 28;9:1033. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01033. eCollection 2018.
The causal illusion is a cognitive bias that results in the perception of causality where there is no supporting evidence. We show that people selectively exhibit the bias, especially in those situations where it favors their current worldview as revealed by their political orientation. In our two experiments (one conducted in Spain and one conducted in the United Kingdom), participants who self-positioned themselves on the ideological left formed the illusion that a left-wing ruling party was more successful in improving city indicators than a right-wing party, while participants on the ideological right tended to show the opposite pattern. In sum, despite the fact that the same information was presented to all participants, people developed the causal illusion bias selectively, providing very different interpretations that aligned with their previous attitudes. This result occurs in situations where participants inspect the relationship between the government's actions and positive outcomes (improving city indicators) but not when the outcomes are negative (worsening city indicators).
因果错觉是一种认知偏差，它会导致在没有支持证据的情况下产生因果关系的认知。我们发现，人们会选择性地表现出这种偏差，尤其是在那些由其政治倾向所揭示的、有利于其当前世界观的情况下。在我们的两项实验中（一项在西班牙进行，一项在英国进行），自我定位在意识形态左派的参与者形成了一种错觉，即左翼执政党在改善城市指标方面比右翼政党更成功，而意识形态右派的参与者则倾向于表现出相反的模式。总之，尽管所有参与者都获得了相同的信息，但人们有选择地产生了因果错觉偏差，给出了与其先前态度相符的截然不同的解释。这种结果出现在参与者考察政府行动与积极结果（改善城市指标）之间关系的情况下，但当结果为负面（城市指标恶化）时则不会出现。
