Causal theory error in college students’ understanding of science studies

When reasoning about science studies, people often make causal theory errors by inferring or accepting a causal claim based on correlational evidence. While humans naturally think in terms of causal relationships, reasoning about science findings requires understanding how evidence supports—or fails to support—a causal claim. This study investigated college students’ thinking about causal claims presented in brief media reports describing behavioral science findings. How do science students reason about causal claims from correlational evidence? And can their reasoning be improved through instruction clarifying the nature of causal theory error? We examined these questions through a series of written reasoning exercises given to advanced college students over three weeks within a psychology methods course. In a pretest session, students critiqued study quality and support for a causal claim from a brief media report suggesting an association between two variables. Then, they created diagrams depicting possible alternative causal theories. At the beginning of the second session, an instructional intervention introduced students to an extended example of a causal theory error through guided questions about possible alternative causes. Then, they completed the same two tasks with new science reports immediately and again 1 week later. The results show students’ reasoning included fewer causal theory errors after the intervention, and this improvement was maintained a week later. Our findings suggest that interventions aimed at addressing reasoning about causal claims in correlational studies are needed even for advanced science students, and that training on considering alternative causal theories may be successful in reducing casual theory error.

Applying Evidential Pluralism to the social sciences

Evidential Pluralism maintains that in order to establish a causal claim one normally needs to establish the existence of an appropriate conditional correlation and the existence of an appropriate mechanism complex, so when assessing a causal claim one ought to consider both association studies and mechanistic studies. Hitherto, Evidential Pluralism has been applied to medicine, leading to the EBM+ programme, which recommends that evidence-based medicine should systematically evaluate mechanistic studies alongside clinical studies. This paper argues that Evidential Pluralism can also be fruitfully applied to the social sciences. In particular, Evidential Pluralism provides (i) a new approach to evidence-based policy; (ii) a new account of the evidential relationships in more theoretical research; and (iii) new philosophical motivation for mixed methods research. The application of Evidential Pluralism to the social sciences is also defended against two objections.

Experimental evidence that apologies promote forgiveness by communicating relationship value

Robust evidence supports the importance of apologies for promoting forgiveness. Yet less is known about how apologies exert their effects. Here, we focus on their potential to promote forgiveness by way of increasing perceptions of relationship value. We used a method for directly testing these causal claims by manipulating both the independent variable and the proposed mediator. Namely, we use a 2 (Apology: yes vs. no) × 2 (Value: high vs. low) concurrent double-randomization design to test whether apologies cause forgiveness by affecting the same causal pathway as relationship value. In addition to supporting this causal claim, we also find that apologies had weaker effects on forgiveness when received from high-value transgressors, suggesting that the forgiveness-relevant information provided by apologies is redundant with relationship value. Taken together, these findings from a rigorous methodological paradigm help us parse out how apologies promote relationship repair.

Life satisfaction and the conventionality of political participation: The moderation effect of post-materialist value orientation

Does life satisfaction (LS) predict people’s likelihood of participating in politics? Although the relationship between LS and political participation (PP) has been widely debated, its correlation and causality remain inconclusive. We contribute to the literature by exploring the moderation effect of post-materialist value orientation. By conceptualizing the conventionality of PP as a continuous spectrum, we suggest a new typology beyond the dichotomous understanding. Seventh-wave data from the World Values Survey in Hong Kong indicate that individuals who are more dissatisfied with their lives are more likely to engage in radicalized actions such as strikes and boycotts. This negative relationship is particularly strong among people with a post-materialist orientation, yet LS is not related to electoral participation and normalized actions, including peaceful demonstrations commonly regarded as ‘unconventional’ in previous studies. Furthermore, the results of propensity score matching reinforce the causal claim that LS predicts radicalized action negatively.

What Matters for Job Security? Exploring the Relationships among Symbolic, Instrumental Images, and Attractiveness for Corporations in South Korea

This study examines the extent to which the symbolic and instrumental images and attractiveness toward an organization are related. This study further focuses on global human resource management and reports findings from two studies: Study 1 uses the data from undergraduate students, and Study 2 cross-validates the findings of Study 1 by using actual data from employees. The distinction of this study from previous works is that the present work focuses on a Korean organizational context (collectivistic cultures) and the differences between the potential applicants and employees in the perception of an organization′s attractiveness. Furthermore, it investigates the relationship between the symbolic and instrumental images toward organizations, unlike existing relative research. The results show that the symbolic and instrumental images are related, and the perceptions of the corporate image differ for the potential applicants and employees in the context of collectivistic cultures. The more competent employees consider their organization to be, the more job security they perceive their organization to provide. Moreover, the symbolic image of being competent is negatively related to the instrumental image of job security. Since this study used cross-sectional data, future studies need to use longitudinal data to establish our model′s causal claim empirically and investigate the underlying reasons behind these differences.

The argument from correlation to cause in science communication

The main activity within popularized science communication is the expert‐to‐layman transferral of scientific knowledge. Correlative connections have proven to be a problematic concept to adequately communicate and form a relatively common source for the misrepresentation of scientific knowledge. Depending on the strength of the causal claim, such an inferential step can be considered an “argument from correlation to cause”. This paper reconstructs the argumentative pattern that is typical for these arguments and proposes a number of critical questions for their evaluation. Finally, an analysis is presented of a natural example of reasoning from correlational evidence to cause within the context of popularized science.

Religiosity Predicts Evidentiary Standards

Research shows that religious and nonreligious individuals have different standards of evidence for religious and scientific claims. Here, in a preregistered replication and extension of McPhetres and Zuckerman, participants read about an effect attributed to either a scientific or religious cause, then assessed how much evidence, in the form of successful replications, would be needed to confirm or to reject the causal claim. As previously observed, religious individuals exhibited a bias for believing religious claims relative to scientific claims, while nonreligious individuals were consistent in their standards of evidence across domains. In a novel extension examining standards of evidence with respect to failures of replication, we found that religious individuals were consistent across domains, whereas nonreligious individuals indicated a lower threshold for rejecting religious claims relative to scientific claims. These findings indicate asymmetries in the evaluation of claims based on the presence versus absence of supportive evidence.

Episodic memory and the witness trump card

We accept Mahr & Csibra's (M&C's) causal claim that episodic memory provides humans with the means for evaluating the veracity of reports about non-occurrent events. We reject their evolutionary argument that this is the proper function of episodic memory. We explore three intriguing implications of the causal claim, for cognitive neuropsychology, comparative psychology, and philosophy.

Counterfactuals and Foreign Policy Analysis

Counterfactuals seek to alter some feature or event of the pass and by means of a chain of causal logic show how the present might, or would, be different. Counterfactual inquiry—or control of counterfactual situations—is essential to any causal claim. More importantly, counterfactual thought experiments are essential, to the construction of analytical frameworks. Policymakers routinely use then by to identify problems, work their way through problems, and select responses. Good foreign-policy analysis must accordingly engage and employ counterfactuals. There are two generic types of counterfactuals: minimal-rewrite counterfactuals and miracle counterfactuals. They have relevance when formulating propositions and probing contingency and causation. There is also a set of protocols for using both kinds of counterfactuals toward these ends, and it illustrates the uses and protocols with historical examples. Policymakers invoke counterfactuals frequently, especially with regard to foreign policy, to both choose policies and defend them to key constituencies. They use counterfactuals in a haphazard and unscientific manner, and it is important to learn more about how they think about and employ counterfactuals to understand foreign policy.