ArticlePloS one2017
Causal illusions in children when the outcome is frequent.
Article in PloS one, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 14 citations in OpenAlex.
- Presentation format influences the strength of causal illusions.Memory & cognition · 2025Article
- Instructing participants about the random assignment of patients to treated and non-treated conditions does not diminish causal illusions.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- 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
- The tendency to stop collecting information is linked to illusions of causality.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Biased Sampling and Causal Estimation of Health-Related Information: Laboratory-Based Experimental Research.Journal of medical Internet research · 2020Article
- Behavior and illusions: a model to study superstition in a participant replacement experiment.Psicologia, reflexao e critica : revista semestral do Departamento de Psicologia da UFRGS · 2018Article
- Causal illusions in children when the outcome is frequent.PloS one · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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.
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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.