Causal illusion in the core of pseudoscientific beliefs: The role of information interpretation and search strategies

Abstract

The prevalence of pseudoscientific beliefs in our societies negatively influences relevant areas such as health or education. Causal illusions have been proposed as a possible cognitive basis for the development of such beliefs. The aim of our study was to further investigate the specific nature of the association between causal illusion and endorsement of pseudoscientific beliefs through an active contingency detection task. In this task, volunteers are given the opportunity to manipulate the presence or absence of a potential cause in order to explore its possible influence over the outcome. Responses provided are assumed to reflect both the participants’ information interpretation strategies as well as their information search strategies. Following a previous study investigating the association between causal illusion and the presence of paranormal beliefs, we expected that the association between causal illusion and pseudoscientific beliefs would disappear when controlling for the information search strategy (i.e., the proportion of trials in which the participants decided to present the potential cause). Volunteers with higher pseudoscientific beliefs also developed stronger causal illusions in active contingency detection tasks. This association appeared irrespective of the participants with more pseudoscientific beliefs showing (Experiment 2) or not (Experiment 1) differential search strategies. Our results suggest that both information interpretation and search strategies could be significantly associated to the development of pseudoscientific (and paranormal) beliefs.

Thinking disposition, thinking style, and susceptibility to causal illusion predict fake news discriminability

“…Previous studies had linked susceptibility to develop stronger causal illusions with the endorsement of beliefs closely related to fake news, such as paranormal or pseudoscientific beliefs (Blanco et al, 2015; Griffiths et al, 2018; Torres et al, 2020, 2022). We specifically predicted that one individual's tendency to develop causal misattributions, such as causally linking two events based on mere temporo‐spatial coincidences (e.g., the 5G network and COVID19), could be contributing to their inclination to accept fake news as reliable.…”

“…Moreover, the more general phenomenon of illusory pattern perception has also been associated with acceptance of epistemically suspect beliefs (van Prooijen et al, 2018;Walker et al, 2019). The association between causal illusion and unwarranted beliefs has been observed both in passive (Torres et al, 2020) and active (Blanco et al, 2015;Torres et al, 2022) versions of the contingency learning task and, in the latter ones, those individuals that more strongly endorse unwarranted beliefs also show stronger search biases (Blanco et al, 2015;Torres et al, 2022), which suggests that unwarranted beliefs might be associated both with a bias in the interpretation of causal information and with a bias when searching for causal information (as noted by Griffiths et al, 2018).…”