Spontaneous assimilation of continuous values and temporal information in causal induction.

Existing models of causal induction primarily rely on the contingency between the presence and the absence of a causal candidate and an effect. Yet, classification of observations into these four types of covariation data may not be straightforward because (a) most causal candidates, in real life, are continuous with ambiguous, intermediate values and because (b) effects may unfold after some temporal lag, providing ambiguous contingency information. Although past studies suggested various reasons why ambiguous information may not be used during causal induction, the authors examined whether learners spontaneously use ambiguous information through a process called causal assimilation. In particular, the authors examined whether learners willingly place ambiguous observations into one of the categories relevant to the causal hypothesis, in accordance with their current causal beliefs. In Experiment 1, people's frequency estimates of contingency data reflected that information ambiguous along a continuous quantity dimension was spontaneously categorized and assimilated in a causal induction task. This assimilation process was moderated by the strength of the upheld causal hypothesis (Experiment 2), could alter the overall perception of a causal relationship (Experiment 3), and could occur over temporal sequences (Experiment 4). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Driven by power? Probe question and presentation format effects on causal judgment.

It has been proposed that causal power (defined as the probability with which a candidate cause would produce an effect in the absence of any other background causes) can be intuitively computed from cause-effect covariation information. Estimation of power is assumed to require a special type of counterfactual probe question, worded to remove potential sources of ambiguity. The present study analyzes the adequacy of such questions to evoke normative causal power estimation. The authors report that judgments to counterfactual probes do not conform to causal power and that they strongly depend on both the probe question wording and the way that covariation information is presented. The data are parsimoniously accounted for by an alternative model of causal judgment, the Evidence Integration rule. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and integration of contingency evidence in causal judgment.

Age differences in causal judgment are consistently greater for preventative/negative relationships than for generative/positive relationships. In this study, a feature analytic procedure (Mandel & Lehman, 1998) was used to determine whether this effect might be due to differences in young and older adults’ integration of contingency evidence during causal induction. To reduce the impact of age-related changes in learning/memory, the authors presented contingency evidence for preventative, noncontingent, and generative relationships in summary form; the meaningfulness of causal context was varied to induce participants to integrate greater or lesser amounts of this evidence. Young adults showed greater flexibility in their integration processes than did older adults. In an abstract causal context, there were no age differences in causal judgment or integration, but in meaningful contexts, young adults’ judgments for preventative relationships were more accurate than older adults’ and young adults assigned more weight to the contingency evidence confirming these relationships. These differences were mediated by age-related changes in processing speed. The decline in this basic cognitive resource may place boundaries on the amount or type of evidence that older adults can integrate for causal judgment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Can the availability heuristic explain vividness effects?

Two studies with 108 undergraduates investigated vivid information and its impact on social judgment and the availability heuristic and its role in mediating vividness effects. In Study 1, Ss listened to a tape recording that described a woman who lived with her 7-yr-old son. Ss then heard arguments about the woman's fitness as a parent and were asked to draw their own conclusions regarding her fitness or unfitness. Concrete and colorful language was found to influence judgments about the woman's fitness as a mother. Study 2 examined whether the presence vs absence of photographs would bias Ss' estimates as to the percentage of Yale (vs Stanford) students in the sample of men and women whose names appeared on the original list and whether these percentages were causally related to the respondents' memory for the college affiliations of the individual students on the list. The presence of photographs affected judgments about the proportion of male and female students at the 2 universities. Such effects have typically been attributed to the ready accessibility of vividly presented information in memory—that is, to the availability heuristic. In these 2 studies, vividness affected both availability and judgment. However, causal modeling results indicate that the availability heuristic did not play a role in the judgment process. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Accounting for occurrences: A new view of the use of contingency information in causal judgment.

When people make causal judgments from contingency information, a principal aim is to account for occurrences of the outcome. When 2 causes are under consideration, the capacity of either to account for occurrences is judged from how likely the cause is to be present when the outcome occurs and from the rate at which the outcome occurs when that cause alone is present, which gives an estimate of the strength of the cause. These propositions are formalized in a weighted averaging model, which successfully predicted several judgmental phenomena not predicted by other models of causal judgment. These include a tendency for judgment of one cause (A) to be reduced as the number of occurrences of when only the other one (B) increases and a tendency for A to receive higher judgments than B if A is better able to account for occurrences than B is even if B has a higher contingency with the outcome than A does. Overshadowing, a tendency for judgments of B to be depressed if A has a higher contingency, is weak or absent when B is better able to account for occurrences than A. Results of several experiments support these and related predictions derived from the accounting for occurrences hypothesis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Beyond simple pessimism: Effects of sadness and anger on social perception.

In keeping with cognitive appraisal models of emotion, it was hypothesized that sadness and anger would exert different influences on causal judgments. Two experiments provided initial support for this hypothesis. Sad Ss perceived situationally-caused events as more likely (Exp 1) and situational forces more responsible for an ambiguous event (Exp 2) than angry Ss, who, in contrast, perceived events caused by humans as more likely and other people as more responsible. Exps 3, 4, and 5 showed that the experience of these emotions, rather than their cognitive constituents, mediates these effects. The nonemotional exposure to situational or human agency information did not influence causal judgments (Exp 3), whereas the induction of sadness and anger without explicit agency information did (Exps 4 and 5). Discussion is focused on the influence of emotion on social judgment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Overestimating causality: Attributional effects of confirmatory processing.

People may routinely overestimate the strength of a hypothesized cause of an outcome. In 4 experiments, Ss exaggerated the extent to which an outcome resulted from a focal cause. The tendency was attenuated when Ss were prompted to explain the outcome or consider alternative causes before the judgment. Surprisingly, stronger causal inferences were drawn when Ss were highly accountable for their judgments. The results indicate that causal inferences are often mediated by the confirmatory processes that have been delineated in previous hypothesis testing research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Covariation information and cognitive processing: Effects of causal implications on memory.

Investigated the impact of attributional implications of covariation information on memory for the implied causal agent. 118 undergraduates read summary paragraphs of consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency (CDC) information and were then timed as they verified from memory whether certain probe words, including the name of the implied causal agent, had appeared in the paragraph. In Exps I and II, Ss were not instructed to attend to attributional implications but merely to study the information for the subsequent memory test. In Exp III, Ss made attributions to each paragraph just prior to the probe task. Results indicate that (a) the names of implied causal agents were verified more slowly than names of noncausal entities if the order of CDC components facilitated attributional processing and (b) this effect was obtained regardless of Ss' immediate need to make an attributional judgment. Data are consistent with the interpretation that the implied causal agent was automatically integrated more thoroughly into the memory representation of the information, which had to be "decomposed" to allow verification of the agent's identity. (29 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Strategy selection in causal reasoning: When beliefs and covariation collide.

Investigated how people combine covariation information with pre-existing beliefs when evaluating causal hypotheses. Ss were 752 college students (aged 17–52 yrs). Three experiments, using both within- and between-Ss designs, found that the use of covariation information and beliefs interacted, such that the effects of covariation were larger when people assessed hypotheses about believable than about unbelievable causal candidates. In Exp 2, this interaction was observed when Ss made judgments in stages (e.g., first evaluating covariation information about a causal candidate and then evaluating the believability of a candidate), as well as when the information was presented simultaneously. Exp 3 demonstrated that this pattern was also reflected in Ss' metacognitive judgments: Ss indicated that they weighed covariation information more heavily for believable than unbelievable candidates. Finally, Exps 1 and 2 demonstrated the presence of individual differences in the use of covariation- and belief-based views. That is, individuals who tended to base their causality judgments primarily on belief were less likely to make use of covariation information and vice versa. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of stereotypes in decision making and information-processing strategies.

Investigated the effects of stereotyping on reactions to a behavioral transgression and the recall of information bearing on it in 2 experiments with 112 undergraduates. Ss read a case file describing a transgression (a job-related infraction in Exp I, a criminal act in Exp II) committed by a target. In some cases, the target's transgression was stereotypic of the target's ethnic group (conveyed through his name), and in other cases it was not. After reading the case file, Ss judged the likelihood that the transgression would recur and recommended punishment for the offense. These judgment data supported the hypothesis that stereotypes function as judgmental heuristics. Ss used a stereotype of the target to infer the reasons for the transgression and based their punishment decisions on the implications of these inferences, considering other relevant information only when a stereotype-based explanation of the behavior was not available. However, recall data suggest that, once a stereotype-based impression of the crime and its determinants was formed, Ss reviewed other available information to confirm the implications of this impression. This led to differential recall of presented information, depending on whether its implications were consistent with, inconsistent with, or irrelevant to those of the stereotype. (43 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Processing causally relevant information.

Two experiments tested an information-processing model of causal judgment proposed by D. L. Hamilton, P. D. Grubb, D. A. Acorn, T. K. Trolier, and S. Carpenter (1990). In Exp 1 the explanatory quality (plausibility, sufficiency, and likelihood) of context information pertaining to a behavioral event was varied independently of its implications for internal or external causality. In Exp 2 perceivers performed tasks requiring either item-specific elaboration or relational encoding of the information in addition to making external versus internal causal attributions. Results imply that (a) perceivers encode the causal potency of individual information items even when the judgment task requires only a general internal versus external attribution and (b) perceivers engage in multiple modes of encoding information, depending on the implicational structure of the information array and on the explanatory quality of the context items. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Process models of counselor judgment.

Evaluated several competing process models of the counselor's clinical judgment for their capacity to account for variance in prognostic judgments. 46 doctoral-level students in counseling, clinical, and educational psychology were presented with hypothetical client observations that were varied along 3 dimensions: personality, academic achievement, and disability. On the basis of this information, counselors were asked to make an inference about the client's level of current functioning, to make causal attributions, and to make a clinical prediction about the client's likelihood of progress in counseling. Results of tests of competing models for completeness and parsimony suggest 2 conclusions: (a) Models of the clinical judgments of counselors must attend to the role of certain inferences that mediate between client observations and prognostic judgment; and (b) causal attributions may not play as significant a role in making prognostic judgments as was originally anticipated. (30 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Flexible use of recent information in causal and predictive judgments.

Associative and statistical theories of causal and predictive learning make opposite predictions for situations in which the most recent information contradicts the information provided by older trials (e.g., acquisition followed by extinction). Associative theories predict that people will rely on the most recent information to best adapt their behavior to the changing environment. Statistical theories predict that people will integrate what they have learned in the two phases. The results of this study showed one or the other effect as a function of response mode (trial by trial vs. global), type of question (contiguity, causality, or predictiveness), and postacquisition instructions. That is, participants are able to give either an integrative judgment, or a judgment that relies on recent information as a function of test demands. The authors concluded that any model must allow for flexible use of information once it has been acquired. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Motives for social comparison: The construction–validation distinction.

Suggests that informational social comparison can be motivated by 2 concerns: (a) an interest in obtaining from others any information about the entity that they have at their disposal and that the individual lacks or (b) an interest in obtaining information about the validity of one's judgment by determining if that judgment derives from one's personal biases or from the qualities of the entity. A comparison act motivated by the former concern is termed construction and by the latter is termed validation. The results of Exp I with 38 undergraduates suggest that a construction process occurs only when one's perceived level of information is low and others might possess additional information about the object. Two additional experiments with 39 undergraduates examined the impact of agreement and disagreement from sources similar or dissimilar on a relevant attribute. Exp II examined whether the judgments of each of these others are attributed largely to the other's similarity/dissimilarity or to the amount of information about the entity that the other is thought to possess. Exp III examined the implications of the attributional patterns obtained in Exp II for choice of comparison other under motives to construct vs validate. The 2 motives were found to lead to differing preferences regarding choice of comparison other. (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attention modification program in individuals with generalized anxiety disorder.

Research suggests that individuals with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) show an attention bias for threat-relevant information. However, few studies have examined the causal role of attention bias in the maintenance of anxiety and whether modification of such biases may reduce pathological anxiety symptoms. In the present article, the authors tested the hypothesis that an 8-session attention modification program would (a) decrease attention bias to threat and (b) reduce symptoms of GAD. Participants completed a probe detection task by identifying letters (E or F) replacing one member of a pair of words. The authors trained attention by including a contingency between the location of the probe and the nonthreat word in one group (Attention Modification Program; AMP) and not in the other (attention control condition; ACC). Participants in the AMP showed change in attention bias and a decrease in anxiety, as indicated by both self-report and interviewer measures. These effects were not present in the ACC group. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that attention plays a causal role in the maintenance of GAD and suggest that altering attention mechanisms may effectively reduce anxiety. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Belief-Based and covariation-based cues affect causal discounting.

Examined the extent to which individuals' a priori beliefs contribute to the degree of causal discounting and how those beliefs are combined with covariation-based cues. Ss were 72 university students who made causality judgments on multiple causal candidates for a single given effect in 6 stories. Each candidate varied in terms of the degree to which it covaried with the effect and the degree to which it was a believable precursor to the observed effect. The 1st cause, was of neutral belief and was moderately contingent with the effect. The 2nd cause was either highly believable or highly unbelievable and was either less, the same, or more contingent than the 1st cause. Ss made their judgments before and after being presented with the 2nd cause. The results indicate that the degree to which a causal candidate is discounted depends not only on the degree to which an alternative cause covaries with the effect, but also on whether the alternative is a believable or unbelievable candidate. Specifically, the results show that a highly believable alternative will produce the discounted effect, even if it is a weaker covariate than the original candidate. These findings suggest the need to incorporate both belief-based and covariation-based cues into models of causal attribution. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Three Turtles in Danger: Spontaneous Construction of Causally Relevant Spatial Situation Models.

In 4 experiments, the author explored the spontaneous construction of spatial situation models during discourse comprehension by using the sentence-recognition paradigm of J. D. Bransford, J. R. Barclay, and J. J. Franks (1972). In Experiment 1, signaling causal relevance of spatial relations was a necessary precondition for replicating their original finding of spontaneously constructed spatial representations. Causal relevance was ensured in the subsequent experiments by a judgment task indirectly demanding the evaluation of described spatial relations with regard to causal relevance. Participants spontaneously constructed spatial situation models of text presented auditorily or visually. Effects of spontaneous construction were more reliable when encoding was easier. The results suggest a revised interpretation of J. D. Bransford et al.'s study and corroborate recent evidence showing that relevant spatial information in texts is reliably represented. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Conditioned inhibition produced by extinction-mediated recovery from the relative stimulus validity effect: A test of acquisition and performance models of empirical retrospective revaluation.

Empirical retrospective revaluation is a phenomenon of Pavlovian conditioning and human causal judgment in which posttraining changes in the conditioned response (Pavlovian task) or causal rating (causal judgment task) of a cue occurs in the absence of further training with that cue. Two experiments tested the contrasting predictions made by 2 families of models concerning retrospective revaluation effects. In a conditioned lick-suppression task, rats were given relative stimulus validity training, consisting of reinforcing a compound of conditioned stimuli (CSs) A and X and nonreinforcement of a compound of CSs B and X, which resulted in low conditioned responding to CS X. Massive posttraining extinction of CS A not only enhanced excitatory responding to CS X, but caused CS B to pass both summation (Experiment 1) and retardation (Experiment 2) tests for conditioned inhibition. The inhibitory status of CS B is predicted by the performance-focused extended comparator hypothesis (J. C. Denniston, H. I. Savastano, & R. R. Miller, 2001), but not by acquisition-focused models of empirical retrospective revaluation (e.g., A. Dickinson & J. Burke, 1996; L. J. Van Hamme & E. A. Wasserman, 1994). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The influence of virtual sample size on confidence and causal-strength judgments.

The authors investigated whether confidence in causal judgments varies with virtual sample size--the frequency of cases in which the outcome is (a) absent before the introduction of a generative cause or (b) present before the introduction of a preventive cause. Participants were asked to evaluate the influence of various candidate causes on an outcome as well as to rate their confidence in those judgments. They were presented with information on the relative frequencies of the outcome given the presence and absence of various candidate causes. These relative frequencies, sample size, and the direction of the causal influence (generative vs. preventive) were manipulated. It was found that both virtual and actual sample size affected confidence. Further, confidence affected estimates of strength, but confidence and strength are dissociable. The results enable a consistent explanation of the puzzling previous finding that observed causal-strength ratings often deviated from the predictions of both of the 2 dominant models of causal strength. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)