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Category: Project

Description: Beliefs about cause and effect, including health-related beliefs, can be derived from various sources of information. One way in which people come to form causal beliefs is through direct experience with the cause and outcome co-occuring. That is, causal beliefs are meaningfully related to the perception that the outcome occurs more frequently when the putative cause is present than when it is absent; this is referred to as contingency learning. Although experiments in the laboratory have found contingency estimates to reliably predict causal judgements, it is unclear whether real-world beliefs are also influenced by the perceived contingency between cause and effect. In particular, we were interested in whether health beliefs that are not scientifically-validated, where there is no evidence of a cause-effect contingency, were similarly related to the perceived frequency of the putative cause and effect co-occurring. In a survey conducted in 2017, we asked adult Australians to judge a range of health-related beliefs relating to complementary and alternative medicine, modern technology and medicine, and beliefs relating to general lifestyle and fitness. We also asked respondents to estimate the frequency of the target outcome occurring in the presence and absence of the putative cause. Overall we found evidence that at least for most beliefs, with the exception of controversial beliefs relating to modern technology and medicine, people’s causal judgements are related to the perceived contingency between cause and effect. Interestingly, beliefs that were not well predicted by perceived contingency were meaningfully related to personality factors, in particular scores on the paranormal belief scale. Together, these findings suggest that there is a need to consider the heterogeneity in pseudoscientific beliefs with the goal of tailoring intervention strategies to correct false causal associations.