Grup de Recerca en Cognició i Llenguatge (GRECIL), Departament de Cognició, Desenvolupament i Psicologia de l'Educació, Secció de Processos Cognitius, Institut de Neurociències (INUB), Universitat de Barcelona (UB), Barcelona, Spain.
PLoS One. 2022 Sep 9;17(9):e0272201. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0272201. eCollection 2022.
The prevalence of pseudoscientific beliefs in our societies negatively influences relevant areas such as health or education. Causal illusions have been proposed as a possible cognitive basis for the development of such beliefs. The aim of our study was to further investigate the specific nature of the association between causal illusion and endorsement of pseudoscientific beliefs through an active contingency detection task. In this task, volunteers are given the opportunity to manipulate the presence or absence of a potential cause in order to explore its possible influence over the outcome. Responses provided are assumed to reflect both the participants' information interpretation strategies as well as their information search strategies. Following a previous study investigating the association between causal illusion and the presence of paranormal beliefs, we expected that the association between causal illusion and pseudoscientific beliefs would disappear when controlling for the information search strategy (i.e., the proportion of trials in which the participants decided to present the potential cause). Volunteers with higher pseudoscientific beliefs also developed stronger causal illusions in active contingency detection tasks. This association appeared irrespective of the participants with more pseudoscientific beliefs showing (Experiment 2) or not (Experiment 1) differential search strategies. Our results suggest that both information interpretation and search strategies could be significantly associated to the development of pseudoscientific (and paranormal) beliefs.
在我们的社会中，伪科学信仰的流行对健康或教育等相关领域产生了负面影响。因果错觉已被提出作为发展此类信仰的一种可能的认知基础。我们的研究目的是通过积极的因果检测任务进一步研究因果错觉与伪科学信仰之间的特定关联。在这个任务中，志愿者有机会操纵潜在原因的存在与否，以探索其对结果的可能影响。提供的反应被认为既反映了参与者的信息解释策略，也反映了他们的信息搜索策略。在前一项研究调查因果错觉与超自然信仰存在之间的关联之后，我们预计当控制信息搜索策略（即参与者决定呈现潜在原因的试验比例）时，因果错觉与伪科学信仰之间的关联将会消失。具有更高伪科学信仰的志愿者在积极的因果检测任务中也会产生更强的因果错觉。这种关联出现在参与者表现出（实验 2）或没有表现出（实验 1）不同的搜索策略的情况下。我们的结果表明，信息解释和搜索策略都可能与伪科学（和超自然）信仰的发展有显著的关联。
