Weighting of contingency information in causal judgement: Evidence of hypothesis dependence and use of a positive-test strategy

Contingency is an important cue to causation. Research shows that people unequally weight the cells of a 2 x 2 contingency table as follows: cause-present/effect-present (A) > cause-present/effect-absent (B) > cause-absent/effect-present (C) > cause-absent/effect-absent (D). Although some models of causal judgement can accommodate that fact, most of them assume that the weighting of information is invariant as a function of whether one is assessing a hypothesized generative versus preventive relationship. An experiment was conducted that tested the hypothesis-independence assumption against the predictions of a novel weighted-positive-test-strategy account, which predicts hypothesis dependence in cell weighting. Supporting that account, judgements of hypothesized generative causes showed the standard A > B > C > D inequality, but judgements of hypothesized preventive causes showed the predicted B > A > D > C inequality. The findings reveal that cell weighting in causal judgement is both unequal and hypothesis dependent.