This type of thinking often guides health, financial, and family decisions that should be guided by contrasted knowledge and empirical evidence. Superstitious and pseudoscientific thinking appear to be increasing in several European countries (while not changing in others see European Commission, 2010). Two in five Europeans are superstitious ( European Commission, 2010), and more than 35% of Americans believe in haunted houses or extrasensory perception ( Moore, 2005). This attitude is causing serious problems for many people, sometimes even death ( Freckelton, 2012).ĭespite the effort of governments and skeptical organizations to promote a knowledge-based society, the effectiveness of such campaigns has been limited at best ( Schwarz et al., 2007 Nyhan and Reifler, 2015). Some people go even further and prefer alternative medicine over scientific medicine. That is, they feel as if recovery was caused by the treatment ( Lilienfeld et al., 2014). Therefore, it works.” Many people in today’s world have come to believe that alternative medicine is effective and that many practices not supported by evidence are reliable simply because “they work for them,” as they put it. The illusion of causality in this case arises from very simple intuitions based on coincidences: “I take the pill. Even so, 34% of Europeans believe that homeopathy is effective ( European Commission, 2005). Indeed, causal illusions and related cognitive biases such as overconfidence, the illusion of control, and illusory correlations have been suggested as the basis of financial bubbles (e.g., Malmendier and Tate, 2005), social stereotypes ( Hamilton and Gifford, 1976 Crocker, 1981 Murphy et al., 2011), hostile driving behavior ( Stephens and Ohtsuka, 2014), social intolerance and war ( Johnson, 2004 Lilienfeld et al., 2009), and public health problems such as the increased popularity of alternative and complementary medicine ( Matute et al., 2011 Blanco et al., 2014).įor example, many reports have shown that homeopathy has no causal effect on patient health other than a placebo effect ( Shang et al., 2005 Singh and Ernst, 2008 Ernst, 2015 National Health and Medical Research Council, 2015). Examples of causal illusions can easily be found in many important areas of everyday life, including economics, education, politics, and health. Many of them involve causal illusions, which are the perception of a causal relationship between events that are actually unrelated. Superstitious, magical, and pseudoscientific thinking refer to ungrounded beliefs that are not supported by current evidence ( Lindeman and Svedholm, 2012). In today’s world, there is a growing tendency to trust personal beliefs, superstitions, and pseudoscience more than scientific evidence ( Lewandowsky et al., 2012 Schmaltz and Lilienfeld, 2014 Achenbach, 2015 Carroll, 2015 Haberman, 2015). We discuss how research on the illusion of causality can contribute to the teaching of scientific thinking and how scientific thinking can reduce illusion. In this article, we review experiments that our group has conducted on the illusion of causality during the last 20 years. Teaching how to think scientifically should benefit from better understanding of the illusion of causality. Scientific thinking is the best possible safeguard against them, but it does not come intuitively and needs to be taught. Like optical illusions, they can occur for anyone under well-known conditions. Such illusions have been proposed to underlie pseudoscience and superstitious thinking, sometimes leading to disastrous consequences in relation to critical life areas, such as health, finances, and wellbeing. Illusions of causality occur when people develop the belief that there is a causal connection between two events that are actually unrelated. 4EventLab, Departamento de Personalidad, Evaluación y Tratamiento Psicológico, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.3Departamento de Psicología Básica, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.2Primary Care and Public Health Sciences, King’s College London, London, UK.1Departamento de Fundamentos y Métodos de la Psicología, Universidad de Deusto, Bilbao, Spain.Helena Matute 1 *, Fernando Blanco 1, Ion Yarritu 1, Marcos Díaz-Lago 1, Miguel A.
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