Contingency, causation, and adaptive inference

Abstract

In contingency judgment tasks involving 2 event types, individuals weight the a and b cells of a 2 × 2 contingency table more than the c and d cells. Some theorists have argued that they can provide normative justifications for this weighting and that the weighting reflects simple heuristics that are adaptive in the real world. The authors show that, to avoid error, individual judgments about real contingencies should be more subtle than these supposedly adaptive heuristics allow.