Outcome additivity, elemental processing and blocking in human causality judgements

Abstract

Informing participants in a causal judgement task that outcomes are additive can increase blocking effects (Experiment 1). Outcome additivity information emphasizes the fact that the outcome following a compound is the sum of the effects of its elements. We suggest that the effect of providing outcome additivity information is to encourage elemental processing and thereby enhance blocking. Experiment 2 showed that blocking could be enhanced by factors encouraging elemental processing, and Experiment 3 demonstrated that blocking was reduced by manipulating the visual presentation of cues to encourage configural processing. While these experiments do not rule out the role of inference in causal judgement tasks, the results are most parsimoniously explained by associative accounts that allow flexibility in the encoding of compound cues.