ReviewFrontiers in psychology2015
Illusions of causality: how they bias our everyday thinking and how they could be reduced.
Review in Frontiers in psychology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 55 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
55 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Systematic review and meta-analysis of educational approaches to reduce cognitive biases among students.Nature human behaviour · 2025Pooled it
- Base-rate expectations modulate the causal illusion.PloS one · 2019Trial
- Methodological Considerations for Studies in Sport and Exercise Science with Women as Participants Part II: Guidance for Applied Studies in Elite Female Athletes.Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.) · 2026Article
- Doctors vs. Algorithms: Physicians, too, struggle to learn from evidence that contradicts AI suggestions.PLOS digital health · 2026Article
- Predicting continuous outcomes: Some new tests of associative approaches to contingency learning.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Beyond mediation: the direct effect of expectations on the illusion of control.Cognitive processing · 2026Article
- The Risks of Misunderstanding the Term "Risk Factor": A Primer with Suggestions to Improve Sports Medicine.Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.) · 2026Review
- Action-effect proximity, order, and predictability differentially modulate electrophysiological responses and explicit judgements of agency.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Transient and Long-Term Risks of Common Physical Activities in People With Low Back Pain.JAMA network open · 2025Article
- Presentation format influences the strength of causal illusions.Memory & cognition · 2025Article
- Reducing the causal illusion: a question of motivation or of information?Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- The combined effect of patient classification systems and availability of resources can bias the judgments of treatment effectiveness.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Individual differences in the evolution of causal illusions.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2025Article
- Contingency learning of social cues: neural engagement and emotional modulation by facial expressions.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
- Improving the teaching of "Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- "The Secret" to Success? The Psychology of Belief in Manifestation.Personality & social psychology bulletin · 2025Article
- The Ant and the Grasshopper: Does Biased Cognition Compromise Agency in the Case of Delusions and Conspiracy Theories?Review of philosophy and psychology · 2024Article
- A large-scale study and six-month follow-up of an intervention to reduce causal illusions in high school students.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Perceived Penalties for Sharing Patient Beliefs with Health Care Providers.Medical decision making : an international journal of the Society for Medical Decision Making · 2024Article
- Proneness to false memory generation predicts pseudoscientific belief endorsement.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Illusions of causality occur when people develop the belief that there is a causal connection between two events that are actually unrelated. Such illusions have been proposed to underlie pseudoscience and superstitious thinking, sometimes leading to disastrous consequences in relation to critical life areas, such as health, finances, and wellbeing. Like optical illusions, they can occur for anyone under well-known conditions. Scientific thinking is the best possible safeguard against them, but it does not come intuitively and needs to be taught. Teaching how to think scientifically should benefit from better understanding of the illusion of causality. In this article, we review experiments that our group has conducted on the illusion of causality during the last 20 years. We discuss how research on the illusion of causality can contribute to the teaching of scientific thinking and how scientific thinking can reduce illusion.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.