@misc{10481/101231,
year = {2020},
url = {https://hdl.handle.net/10481/101231},
abstract = {Judgments of a treatment’s effectiveness are usually biased by the probability with which the outcome (e.g., symptom
relief) appears: even when the treatment is completely ineffective (i.e., there is a null contingency between cause and
outcome), judgments tend to be higher when outcomes appear with high probability. In this research, we present ambiguous
stimuli, expecting to find individual differences in the tendency to interpret them as outcomes. In Experiment 1, judgments
of effectiveness of a completely ineffective treatment increased with the spontaneous tendency of participants to interpret
ambiguous stimuli as outcome occurrences (i.e., healings). In Experiment 2, this interpretation bias was affected by the
overall treatment-outcome contingency, suggesting that the tendency to interpret ambiguous stimuli as outcomes is learned
and context-dependent. In conclusion, we show that, to understand how judgments of effectiveness are affected by outcome
probability, we need to also take into account the variable tendency of people to interpret ambiguous information as outcome
occurrences.},
organization = {Support for this research was provided by Grants PSI2017-83196-R and PSI2016-78818-R from Agencia Estatal de Investigación of the Spanish Government (AEI) and European Regional Development Fund (FEDER) awarded to Fernando Blanco and Helena Matute respectively, as well as Grant IT955-16 from the Basque Government awarded to Helena Matute. Manuela Maria Moreno-Fernandez was supported by a post-doctoral grant RTI2018-096700-J-I00 from Agencia Estatal de Investigación of the Spanish Government (AEI).},
keywords = {illusion of causality},
keywords = {outcome-density},
keywords = {contingency learning},
title = {Are the symptoms really remitting? How the subjective interpretation of outcomes can produce an illusion of causality.},
doi = {10.1017/S1930297500007506},
author = {Blanco Bregón, Fernando and Moreno Fernandez, María Manuela and Matute, Helena},
}