Judgment of Covariation: A Review

Abstract

This paper reviews a selection of influential studies on judgment of covariation in order to examine how accurate people's covariation judgments are in general, and how sophisticated are the reasoning strategies that they use to make those judgments. Very different answers have been given to these questions, depending on several factors, including the method that is used to assess people's performance on these tasks, and the motivation that people have to reach certain conclusions. It is argued that, although people are often quite poor at judging covariation, they are flexible in the reasoning strategies that they use to do so, and they have the potential to use sophisticated strategies and make accurate judgments when certain conditions are met.