ABSTRACT
The current study investigates how people incorporate ambiguous information into judgments of causal relations. We presented participants with information that was not easily classified into the presence or absence of a candidate cause, breaking a traditional requirement of models of causal induction. We found that people were willing to incorporate this ambiguous information into their collected evidence, instead of ignoring the information as uninformative. Furthermore, people interpreted ambiguous stimuli as evidence most consistent with their prevailing causal hypothesis. These results give an idea of how people begin to determine what can function as a candidate cause in a causal induction problem.
