Trial reportPloS one2019
Base-rate expectations modulate the causal illusion.
Trial report in PloS one, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 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.
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Placebo effects in alternative medical treatments for anxiety: false hope or healing potential?CNS spectrums · 2025Trial
- Base-rate expectations modulate the causal illusion.PloS one · 2019Trial
- Beyond mediation: the direct effect of expectations on the illusion of control.Cognitive processing · 2026Article
- 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
- Instruction on the Scientific Method Provides (Some) Protection Against Illusions of Causality.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2024Article
- Reasoning strategies and prior knowledge effects in contingency learning.Memory & cognition · 2022Article
- Hearing hooves, thinking zebras: A review of the inverse base-rate effect.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2021Review
- Causal illusions in the classroom: how the distribution of student outcomes can promote false instructional beliefs.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2020Article
- Biased Sampling and Causal Estimation of Health-Related Information: Laboratory-Based Experimental Research.Journal of medical Internet research · 2020Article
- When Success Is Not Enough: The Symptom Base-Rate Can Influence Judgments of Effectiveness of a Successful Treatment.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Previous research revealed that people's judgments of causality between a target cause and an outcome in null contingency settings can be biased by various factors, leading to causal illusions (i.e., incorrectly reporting a causal relationship where there is none). In two experiments, we examined whether this causal illusion is sensitive to prior expectations about base-rates. Thus, we pretrained participants to expect either a high outcome base-rate (Experiment 1) or a low outcome base-rate (Experiment 2). This pretraining was followed by a standard contingency task in which the target cause and the outcome were not contingent with each other (i.e., there was no causal relation between them). Subsequent causal judgments were affected by the pretraining: When the outcome base-rate was expected to be high, the causal illusion was reduced, and the opposite was observed when the outcome base-rate was expected to be low. The results are discussed in the light of several explanatory accounts (associative and computational). A rational account of contingency learning based on the evidential value of information can predict our findings.
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What OpenQuestion holds
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.