Reasoning about redundant and non-redundant alternative causes of a single outcome: Blocking or enhancement caused by the stronger cause

Abstract

Perceptions of the effectiveness of a moderate probabilistic cause are influenced by the presence of stronger alternative causes. One important idea is that this influence occurs because the strong cause renders the weaker one statistically redundant. Alternatively, the causes might be contrasted to each other, so the stronger cause may simply overpower perceptions of the weaker one. Causes may have the same polarity (e.g., two generative/excitatory causes or two preventive/inhibitory causes) or be of opposite polarity (e.g., a generative cause versus a preventive or inhibitory cause). Previously, we found that the presence of a stronger redundant alternative cause of the same polarity reduces causal judgments of the moderate cause (i.e., blocking occurs) but a stronger cause of the opposite polarity enhances judgments of the moderate cause (i.e., enhancement; Darredeau, Baetu, Baker & Murphy, 2009). Experiments 1 and 2 further explored these cue competition effects with redundant and non-redundant alternative causes (i.e., correlated versus independent alternatives). We generally found that blocking and enhancement occur with both redundant and non-redundant alternative causes. This is inconsistent with an information processing view of cue competition that relies on statistical redundancy to account for blocking. Although these results are inconsistent with a redundancy information processing account of cue competition and are consistent with our earlier contrast account, we demonstrate here that a simple associative model (Rescorla & Wagner, 1972) can account for the sometimes apparently contradictory effects of cue competition.

The psychology of associative learning: Editorial

“…The paper by Baetu and Baker (2019) considers the question of whether people are "intuitive statisticians" and use some form of rational inference to infer causal relationships, or whether a more basic, associative process is sometimes involved. They use a contingency learning paradigm of their own devising and a design that looks at cue competition of various kinds.…”