Effects of Observation and Intervention on the Judgment of Causal and Correlational Relationships

摘要

Recent theories of causal judgment describe it as a two-stage process involving a heuristic stage and an analytic stage. The present study evaluated discrimination of causal and correlational relationships using observation and intervention tasks. Results show that participants' causal judgments reflected the objective sample correlations in the observation tasks rather than the probabilities in the intervention tasks. This suggests that people are more sensitive to objective correlations than underlying causal probabilities.