Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Causal judgments are stubborn. If people learn about twocorrelated variables B and C, and judge that B causes C, theytypically stick to that judgment even when contradictoryevidence comes to light. One form of contradictory evidenceis that a third variable A causes both B and C, explaining thecorrelation. This paper extends prior work showing thatsimply presenting statistical evidence that A is the commoncause of both B and C does not lead to belief change about B.However, if first subjects learn to categorize phenomena bytheir underlying causal relationships (i.e., as exemplars of acommon cause category), then they can transfer their categoryknowledge to properly interpret the evidence. They recognizethat A is the common cause of B and C and revise their beliefabout B. These results suggest that teaching abstract causalcategories is a promising strategy to help revise false beliefs.