When Success Is Not Enough: The Symptom Base-Rate Can Influence Judgments of Effectiveness of a Successful Treatment
Metadatos
Mostrar el registro completo del ítemEditorial
FRONTIERS MEDIA SA
Materia
Causal learning Cognitive biases Patients’ beliefs Base-rates Causal judgment
Fecha
2020Referencia bibliográfica
Blanco F, Moreno-Fernández MM and Matute H (2020) When Success Is Not Enough: The Symptom Base-Rate Can Influence Judgments of Effectiveness of a Successful Treatment. Front. Psychol. 11:560273. [doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.560273]
Patrocinador
Agencia Estatal de Investigacion of the Spanish Government (AEI) PSI2017-83196-R RTI2018-096700-J-I00 PSI2016-78818-R; Basque Government IT955-16Resumen
Patients’ beliefs about the effectiveness of their treatments are key to the success
of any intervention. However, since these beliefs are usually formed by sequentially
accumulating evidence in the form of the covariation between the treatment use and
the symptoms, it is not always easy to detect when a treatment is actually working.
In Experiments 1 and 2, we presented participants with a contingency learning task in
which a fictitious treatment was actually effective to reduce the symptoms of fictitious
patients. However, the base-rate of the symptoms was manipulated so that, for half of
participants, the symptoms were very frequent before the treatment, whereas for the rest
of participants, the symptoms were less frequently observed. Although the treatment
was equally effective in all cases according to the objective contingency between the
treatment and healings, the participants’ beliefs on the effectiveness of the treatment
were influenced by the base-rate of the symptoms, so that those who observed frequent
symptoms before the treatment tended to produce lower judgments of effectiveness.
Experiment 3 showed that participants were probably basing their judgments on an
estimate of effectiveness relative to the symptom base-rate, rather than on contingency
in absolute terms. Data, materials, and R scripts to reproduce the figures are publicly
available at the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/emzbj/.