Illusions of causality: how they bias our everyday thinking and how they could be reduced

By H. Matute, Fernando Blanco, Ion Yarritu, Marcos Díaz-Lago, M. Vadillo, I. Barberia. 2015

143 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Illusions of causality occur when people develop the belief that there is a causal connection between two events that are actually unrelated. Such illusions have been proposed to underlie pseudoscience and superstitious thinking, sometimes leading to disastrous consequences in relation to critical life areas, such as health, finances, and wellbeing. Like optical illusions, they can occur for anyone under well-known conditions. Scientific thinking is the best possible safeguard against them, but it does not come intuitively and needs to be taught. Teaching how to think scientifically should benefit from better understanding of the illusion of causality. In this article, we review experiments that our group has conducted on the illusion of causality during the last 20 years. We discuss how research on the illusion of causality can contribute to the teaching of scientific thinking and how scientific thinking can reduce illusion.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. Bernhard Schölkopf
2. Niki Kilbertus
3. Giambattista Parascandolo
4. Dominik Janzing

In Social Psychology

1. Bernhard Schölkopf
2. Giambattista Parascandolo

Citations in the corpus

• Generalization in anti-causal learning (2018, methodology): “Because we rely on these robust models in anti-causal tasks (Longcamp et al., 2003; James and Gauthier, 2006), we are quick to infer causal relations even when there are none (Pronin et al., 2006; Matute et al., 2015).”