Knowledge mediates the timeframe of covariation assessment in human causal induction

Knowledge mediates the timeframe of covariation assessment in human causal induction

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by Marc J Buehner , Jon May

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TITLE	Knowledge mediates the timeframe of covariation assessment in human causal induction	user correction
AUTHOR NAME	Marc J Buehner	user correction
AUTHOR AFFIL	Department of Psychology; University of Sheffield; Western Bank	user correction
AUTHOR ADDR	Sheffield S10 2TP; England, UK	user correction
AUTHOR NAME	Jon May	user correction
AUTHOR AFFIL	University of Sheffield, England, UK	user correction
ABSTRACT	How do humans discover causal relations when the effect is not immediately observable? Previous experiments have uniformly demonstrated detrimental effects of outcome delays on causal induction. These findings seem to conflict with everyday causal cognition, where humans can apparently identify long-term causal relations with relative ease. Three experiments investigated whether the influence of delay on adult human causal judgments is mediated by experimentally induced assumptions about the timeframe of the causal relation in question, as suggested by Einhorn & Hogarth (1986). Causal judgments generally decreased when a delay separated cause and effect. This decrease was less pronounced when the thematic context of the causal relation induced participants to expect a delay. Experiment 3 ruled out an alternative explanation of the effect based on variations of cue and outcome saliencies, and showed that detrimental effects of delay are reduced even more when instructions explicitly mentioned the timeframe of the causal relation in question. Knowledge thus mediates the impact of	user correction
CITATIONS	23 found	ParsCit 1.0