Causal attribution as a search for underlying mechanisms: An explanation of the conjunction fallacy and the discounting principle

Cognitive Psychology

Volumn 31, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 82-123

  Ahn, Woo Kyoung ^a   Bailenson, Jeremy ^b  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; COGNITION; EPIDEMIOLOGY; HUMAN; LANGUAGE; PROBLEM SOLVING; RANDOMIZATION;

CAUSALITY; COGNITION; HUMANS; LANGUAGE; PROBLEM SOLVING; RANDOM ALLOCATION;

EID: 0030208288     PISSN: 00100285     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1006/cogp.1996.0013     Document Type: Article

References (58)

1. Ackerman, B. P., Paine, J., & Silver, D. (1991). Building a story representation: The effects of early concept prominence on later causal inferences by children. Developmental Psychology, 27, 370-380.
2. Ahn, W., Kalish, C. W., Medin, D. L., & Gelman, S. A. (1995). The role of covariation versus mechanism information in causal attribution. Cognition, 54, 299-352.
3. Braun, O. L., & Wicklund, R. A. (1989). When discounting fails. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 25, 450-461.
4. Cheng, P. W. (1993). Separating causal laws from causal facts: Pressing the limits of statistical relevance. In D. Medin (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 30), 215-264.
5. Cheng, P. W., & Novick, L. R. (1992). Covariation in natural causal induction. Psychological Review, 99, 365-382.
6. Cheng, P. W., & Novick, L. R. (1991). Causes versus enabling conditions. Cognition, 40, 83-120.
7. Cheng, P. W., & Novick, L. R. (1990). A probabilistic contrast model of causal induction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58, 545-567.
8. Einhorn, H. J., & Hogarth, R. M. (1986). Judging probable cause. Psychological Bulletin, 99, 3-19.
9. Forbus, K., & Gentner, D. (1986). Learning physical domains: Towards a theoretical framework: In R. S. Michalski, J. Carbonell, & T. Mitchell (Eds.), Machine learning: An artificial intelligence approach, Vol. II (pp. 311-348). Los Altos, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.
10. Franklin, N., & Tversky, B. (1990). Searching imagined environments. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 119, 63-76.
11. Gelman, S. A., & Wellman, H. M. (1991). Insides and essence: Early understandings of the non-obvious. Cognition, 38, 213-244.
12. Gentner, D., & Stevens, A. L. (Eds.) (1983). Mental models. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
13. Gigerenzer, G. (1991). From tools to theories: A heuristic of discovery in cognitive psychology. Psychological Review, 98, 254-267.
14. Hansen, R. D., & Hall, C. A. (1985). Discounting and augmenting facilitative and inhibitory forces: The winner takes almost all. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49, 1482-1493.
15. Hewstone, M. R. C. (1989). Causal attribution, Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell.
16. Hewstone, M. R. C., & Jaspars, J. M. F. (1987). Covariation and causal attribution: A logical model of the intuitive analysis of variance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53, 663-672.
17. Hilton, D. J. (1988). Contemporary science and natural explanation: Commonsense conceptions of causality. New York: New York Univ. Press.
18. Hilton, D. J., & Slugoski, B. R. (1986). Knowledge-based causal attribution: The abnormal conditions focus model. Psychological Review, 93, 75-88.
19. Hume, D. (1978). A treatise of human nature. Oxford, England: Oxford Univ. Press. (Original work published 1739.)
20. Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1983). Mental models. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
21. Kahneman, D., & Miller, A. (1986). Norm theory: Comparing reality to its alternatives. Psychological Review, 93, 136-153.
22. Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1982). The simulation heuristic. In D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, & A. Tversky (Eds.), Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases (pp. 201-208). NY: Cambridge Univ. Press.
23. Kelley, H. H. (1967). Attribution theory in social psychology. In D. Levine (Ed.), Nebraska symposium on motivation (Vol. 15, pp. 192-238). Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press.
24. Kelley, H. H. (1971). Attribution in social interaction. Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press.
25. Kelley, H. H. (1972). Causal schemata and the attribution process. In E. E. Jones, D. E. Kanouse, H. H. Kelley, R. E. Nisbett, S. Valins, & B. Weiner, Attribution: Perceiving the causes of behavior. Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press.
26. Kelley, H. H. (1973). The processes of causal attribution. American Psychologist, 28, 107-128.
27. Kim, J. (1971). Causes and events: Mackie on causation. Journal of Philosophy, 68, 426-441.
28. Kintsch, W., & van Dijk, T. A. (1978). Toward a model of text comprehension and production, Psychological Review, 85, 363-394.
29. Koehler, D. J. (1991). Explanation, imagination, and confidence in judgment. Psychological Bulletin, 110, 499-519.
30. Koehler, J. J. (1996). The base rate fallacy reconsidered: Descriptive, normative and methodological challenges, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 19, 1-53.
31. Lalljee, M., & Abelson, R. P. (1983). The organization of explanations. In M. Hewstone (Ed.), Attribution theory: Social and functional extensions. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
32. Lalljee, M., Lamb, R., Furnham, A., & Jaspars, J. M. F. (1984). Explanations and information search: Inductive and hypothesis-testing approaches to arriving at an explanation. British Journal of Social Psychology, 23, 201-212.
33. Leddo, J., Abelson, R. P., & Gross, P. H. (1984). Conjunctive explanations: When two reasons are better than one. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47, 933-943.
34. Mandler, J. M., & Johnson, N. S. (1977). Remembering of things parsed: Story structure and recall. Cognitive Psychology, 9, 111-151.
35. McClure, J., Lalljee, M., & Jaspars, J. (1991). Explanations of extreme and moderate events, Journal of Research in Personality, 25, 146-166.
36. McArthur, L. A. (1972). The how and what of why: Some determinants and consequences of causal attribution. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 22, 171-193.
37. Medin, D. L., & Ortony, A. (1989). Psychological essentialism. In S. Vosniadou & A. Ortony (Eds.), Similarity and analogical reasoning (pp. 179-196), NY: Cambridge Univ. Press.
38. Morris, M. W., & Smith, E. E. (in preparation). How much explanation does behavior require?: The paradox between discounting and the conjunction effects in attribution.
39. Pennington, N., & Hastie, R. (1992). Explaining the evidence: Tests of the story model for juror decision making. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62, 189-206.
40. Pennington, N., & Hastie, R. (1988). Explanation-based decision making: Effects of memory structure on judgment. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 14, 521-533.
41. Pennington, N., & Hastie, R. (1986). Evidence evaluation in complex decision making. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 242-258.
42. Read, S. J. (1987). Constructing causal scenarios: A knowledge structure approach to causal reasoning. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 288-302.
43. Read, S. J. (1993). Explanatory coherence in social explanations: A parallel distributed processing account, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 429-447.
44. Robinson, J. A., & Hawpe, L. (1986). Narrative thinking as a heuristic process. In T. R. Sarbin (Ed.), Narrative psychology: The storied nature of human conduct. NY: Proegen.
45. Rumelhart, D. E. (1975). Notes on a schema for stories. In D. G. Brown & A. Collins (Eds.), Representation and understanding: Studies in cognitive science. New York: Academic Press.
46. Schank, R. C., & Abelson, R. P. (1977). Scripts, plans, goals and understanding: An inquiry into human knowledge structures. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
47. Schul, Y., & Burnstein, E. (1985). When discounting fails: Conditions under which individuals use discredited information in making a judgment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49, 894-903.
48. Sherman, S. J., Cialdini, R. B., Schwartzman, D. F., & Reynolds, K. D. (1985). Imagining can heighten or lower the perceived likelihood of contracting a disease: The mediating effect of ease of imagery. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 11, 118-127.
49. Stein, N. L., & Policastro, M. (1984). The concept of a story: A comparison between children's and teachers' viewpoints. In H. Mandl, N. L. Stein, and T. Trabasso (Eds.) Learning and comprehension of text. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
50. Thagard, P. (1989). Explanatory coherence. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 12, 435-467.
51. Thagard, P. (1992). Conceptual revolutions. Princeton Univ. Press, NJ.
52. Thorndyke, P. S. (1977). Cognitive structures in comprehension and memory of narrative discourse. Cognitive Psychology, 9, 77-110.
53. Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1980). Causal schemas in judgments under uncertainty. In M. Fishbein (Ed.), Progress in social psychology (pp. 49-72) Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
54. Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1983). Extensional versus intuitive reasoning: The conjunction fallacy in probability judgment. Psychological Review, 90, 293-315.
55. Wells, G. L., & Gavanski, I. (1989). Mental simulation of causality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56, 161-169.
56. Wolfe, C. R. (1992). There's more than one reason for the base rate fallacy. Unpublished manuscript, Miami University.
57. Zuckerman, M., Eghrari, H., & Lambrecht, M. R. (1986). Attributions as inferences and explanations: Conjunction effects. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 1144-1153.
58. Zuckerman, M., Colwell, E. L., Darche, P. R., Fischer, S. A., Osmun, R. W., Spring, D. D., Winkler, B. A., & Wolfson, L. R. (1988). Attributions as inferences and explanations: Effects of discounting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 748-757.