Interactive effects of the probability of the cue and the probability of the outcome on the overestimation of null contingency

Fernando Blanco, Helena Matute, Miguel A. Vadillo

Overestimations of null contingencies between a cue, C, and an outcome, O, are widely reported effects that can arise for multiple reasons. For instance, a high probability of the cue, P(C), and a high probability of the outcome, P(O), are conditions that promote such overestimations. In two experiments, participants were asked to judge the contingency between a cue and an outcome. Both P(C) and P(O) were given extreme values (high and low) in a factorial design, while maintaining the contingency between the two events at zero. While we were able to observe main effects of the probability of each event, our experiments showed that the cue- and outcome-density biases interacted such that a high probability of the two stimuli enhanced the overestimation beyond the effects observed when only one of the two events was frequent. This evidence can be used to better understand certain societal issues, such as belief in pseudoscience, that can be the result of overestimations of null contingencies in high-P(C) or high-P(O) situations.