ArticleFrontiers in psychology2019
Persistence of Causal Illusions After Extensive Training.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- 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
- Individual differences in the evolution of causal illusions.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2025Article
- Cause-effect perception in an object place task.Frontiers in cognition · 2025Article
- Proneness to false memory generation predicts pseudoscientific belief endorsement.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2024Article
- Unidirectional rating scales overestimate the illusory causation phenomenon.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2024Article
- Causal illusion in the core of pseudoscientific beliefs: The role of information interpretation and search strategies.PloS one · 2022Article
- Believers in pseudoscience present lower evidential criteria.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- The more, the merrier: Treatment frequency influences effectiveness perception and further treatment choice.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2021Article
- The tendency to stop collecting information is linked to illusions of causality.Scientific reports · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We carried out an experiment using a conventional causal learning task but extending the number of learning trials participants were exposed to. Participants in the standard training group were exposed to 48 learning trials before being asked about the potential causal relationship under examination, whereas for participants in the long training group the length of training was extended to 288 trials. In both groups, the event acting as the potential cause had zero correlation with the occurrence of the outcome, but both the outcome density and the cause density were high, therefore providing a breeding ground for the emergence of a causal illusion. In contradiction to the predictions of associative models such the Rescorla-Wagner model, we found moderate evidence against the hypothesis that extending the learning phase alters the causal illusion. However, assessing causal impressions recurrently did weaken participants' causal illusions.
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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.