ArticlePloS one2022
Causal illusion in the core of pseudoscientific beliefs: The role of information interpretation and search strategies.
Article in PloS one, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 12 citations in OpenAlex.
- Anchored and Propagated Updating Within Pseudoscientific Belief Systems.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- 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
- "The Dark Side of Musculoskeletal Care": Why Do Ineffective Techniques Seem to Work? A Comprehensive Review of Complementary and Alternative Therapies.Biomedicines · 2025Review
- The Illusory Health Beliefs Scale: validation using exploratory structural equation modeling and multidimensional Rasch analysis.Frontiers in psychology · 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
- Proneness to false memory generation predicts pseudoscientific belief endorsement.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2024Article
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
The prevalence of pseudoscientific beliefs in our societies negatively influences relevant areas such as health or education. Causal illusions have been proposed as a possible cognitive basis for the development of such beliefs. The aim of our study was to further investigate the specific nature of the association between causal illusion and endorsement of pseudoscientific beliefs through an active contingency detection task. In this task, volunteers are given the opportunity to manipulate the presence or absence of a potential cause in order to explore its possible influence over the outcome. Responses provided are assumed to reflect both the participants' information interpretation strategies as well as their information search strategies. Following a previous study investigating the association between causal illusion and the presence of paranormal beliefs, we expected that the association between causal illusion and pseudoscientific beliefs would disappear when controlling for the information search strategy (i.e., the proportion of trials in which the participants decided to present the potential cause). Volunteers with higher pseudoscientific beliefs also developed stronger causal illusions in active contingency detection tasks. This association appeared irrespective of the participants with more pseudoscientific beliefs showing (Experiment 2) or not (Experiment 1) differential search strategies. Our results suggest that both information interpretation and search strategies could be significantly associated to the development of pseudoscientific (and paranormal) beliefs.
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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.