Contingency, causation, and adaptive inference.

Abstract

In contingency judgment tasks involving 2 event types, individuals\ud weight the a and b cells of a 2 X 2 contingency table more than the c\ud and d cells. Some theorists have argued that they can provide normative\ud justifications For this weighting and that the weighting reflects\ud simple heuristics that are adaptive in the real world. The authors show\ud that, to avoid error, individual judgments about real contingencies\ud should be more subtle than these supposedly adaptive heuristics allow