Forward and backward blocking of causal judgment is enhanced by additivity of effect magnitude

Abstract

When two causes for a given effect are simultaneously presented, it is natural to expect an effect of greater magnitude. However many laboratory tasks preclude such an additivity rule by imposing a ceiling on effect magnitude - for example, by using a binary outcome. Under these conditions, a compound of two causal cues cannot be distinguished from a compound of one causal cue and one noncausal cue. Two experiments tested the effect of additivity on cue competition. Significant but weak forward blocking and no backward blocking were observed in a conventional "allergy" causal judgment task. Explicit pretraining of magnitude additivity produced strong and significant forward and backward blocking. Additivity pretraining was found to be unnecessary for another cue competition effect, release from overshadowing, which does not logically depend on additivity. The results confirm that blocking is constrained when effect magnitude is constrained and provide support for an inferential account of cue competition.