Action-Effect Contingency Judgment Tasks Foster Normative Causal Reasoning

We report two experiments using an action-effect causal inference task in which subjects were asked to evaluate the importance of an action they performed in producing the effect. In Experiment 1, judgments of positive and zero contingencies were a function of the actual action-effect contingency and they were not influenced by the effect base rate. Experiment 2 replicated this finding but did record a significant influence of the effect base rate on ratings of negative contingencies. We identify a number of research avenues that may elucidate why an inferential context involving instrumental learning fosters causal inferences that approximate so closely the actual degree of contingency.