Vadillo, MA;
Ortega-Castro, N;
Barberia, I;
Baker, AG;
(2014)
Two heads are better than one, but how much? Evidence that people's use of causal integration rules does not always conform to normative standards.
Experimental Psychology
, 61
(5)
pp. 356-367.
10.1027/1618-3169/a000255.
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Abstract
Many theories of causal learning and causal induction differ in their assumptions about how people combine the causal impact of several causes presented in compound. Some theories propose that when several causes are present, their joint causal impact is equal to the linear sum of the individual impact of each cause. However, some recent theories propose that the causal impact of several causes needs to be combined by means of a noisy-OR integration rule. In other words, the probability of the effect given several causes would be equal to the sum of the probability of the effect given each cause in isolation minus the overlap between those probabilities. In the present series of experiments, participants were given information about the causal impact of several causes and then they were asked what compounds of those causes they would prefer to use if they wanted to produce the effect. The results of these experiments suggest that participants actually use a variety of strategies, including not only the linear and the noisy-OR integration rules, but also averaging the impact of several causes.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Two heads are better than one, but how much? Evidence that people's use of causal integration rules does not always conform to normative standards. |
| Location: | Germany |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1027/1618-3169/a000255 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1027/1618-3169/a000255 |
| Additional information: | This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Hogrefe OpenMind License, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://www.hogrefe.com/periodicals/openmind/openmind-license/hogrefe-openmind-license/ |
| Keywords: | Causal reasoning, Integration rules, Summation, Adolescent, Child, Cognition, Comprehension, Humans, Learning, Probability, Problem Solving, Social Behavior, Theory of Mind, Visual Perception |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1470229 |
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