The effect of causal knowledge on judgments of the likelihood of unknown features

Abstract

People frequently infer unknown aspects of an entity based on their knowledge about that entity. The current study reports a novel phenomenon, an inductive bias people have in making such inferences. Upon learning that one symptom causes another in a person, both undergraduate students (Experiment 1) and clinicians (Experiment 2) judged that an unknown feature associated with the cause-symptom was more likely to be present in that person than an unknown feature associated with the effect-symptom. Thus, these findings suggest a specific mechanism in which causal explanations influence one's representation of and inferences about an entity. Implications for clinical reasoning and associative models of conceptual knowledge are discussed. Copyright 2007 Psychonomic Society, Inc.