The moral foundations of illusory correlation

Abstract

Previous research has studied the relationship between political ideology and cognitive biases, such as the tendency of conservatives to form stronger illusory correlations between negative infrequent behaviors and minority groups. We further explored these findings by studying the relation between illusory correlation and moral values. According to the moral foundations theory, liberals and conservatives differ in the relevance they concede to different moral dimensions: Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity. Whereas liberals consistently endorse the Care and Fairness foundations more than the Loyalty, Authority and Purity foundations, conservatives tend to adhere to the five foundations alike. In the present study, a group of participants took part in a standard illusory correlation task in which they were presented with randomly ordered descriptions of either desirable or undesirable behaviors attributed to individuals belonging to numerically different majority and minority groups. Although the proportion of desirable and undesirable behaviors was the same in the two groups, participants attributed a higher frequency of undesirable behaviors to the minority group, thus showing the expected illusory correlation effect. Moreover, this effect was specifically associated to our participants’ scores in the Loyalty subscale of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. These results emphasize the role of the Loyalty moral foundation in the formation of attitudes towards minorities among conservatives. Our study points out the moral system as a useful fine-grained framework to explore the complex interaction between basic cognitive processes and ideology.

Are the symptoms really remitting? How the subjective interpretation of outcomes can produce an illusion of causality

“…This is a robust effect that has been replicated, and that could lead to causal illusions (perception of causal links in situations in which there is none; see for review Matute, Blanco & Díaz-Lago, 2019). These mistaken beliefs could, in turn, entail serious consequences, as they could underlie illusions of effectiveness of pseudoscientific medicine (Matute, Yarritu & Vadillo, 2011), and contribute to maintain social prejudice (Blanco, Gómez-Fortes, & Matute, 2018;Rodríguez-Ferreiro & Barberia, 2017).…”

Sex differences in moral judgements across 67 countries

“…Specifically, we [46]. We conducted a secondary analysis on data from 11 969 participants in 19 countries: Australia [47] (n = 1115), Belgium [48] (n = 493), China [49] (n = 393), France [50] (n = 213), Hungary [51] (n = 403), Iran [52] (n = 501), Japan [53] (n = 534), South Korea [54] (n = 478), Latvia [55] (n = 264), Mongolia [56] (n = 444), the Netherlands [48] (n = 285), Poland [57] (n = 1702), Russia [56] (n = 468), Serbia [58] (n = 240), Spain [59] (n = 240), Sweden [60,61] (n = 2068), Turkey [62] (n = 1465), UK [63] (n = 273), and USA (Amazon Mechanical Turk) (n = 390). The median sample size was 444.…”

Debiasing Causal Inferences: Over and Beyond Suboptimal Sampling

“…Everyday thinking and decision making frequently present systematic reasoning errors that lead us to incorrect conclusions (Arkes, 1991; Larrick, 2004; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). These cognitive biases have been shown to play a role in important situations such as medical diagnosis (Croskerry, 2013; Phua & Tan, 2013) or financial decision making (Frydman & Camerer, 2016), as well as social phenomena like prejudice (Rodríguez-Ferreiro & Barberia, 2017) or ideological extremism (Lilienfeld et al, 2009). The influence of cognitive biases in our lives is such that some authors have pointed out the design of effective techniques, aimed to diminish the frequency or intensity of cognitive biases, as one of the most important contributions that psychology could make to humanity (Lilienfeld et al, 2009).…”