Are biases when making causal interventions related to biases in belief updating
Anna Coenen, Todd Matthew Gureckis · 2015
People often make decisions with the goal of gaining informa-tion which can help reduce their uncertainty. However, recent work has suggested that people sometimes do not select the most diagnostic information queries available to them. A crit-ical aspect of information search decisions is evaluating how obtaining a piece of information will alter a learner’s beliefs (e.g., a piece of information that is redundant with what is al-ready known is useless). This suggests a close relationship between information seeking decisions on one hand, and be-lief updating on the other. This paper explores the deeper re-lationship between these two constructs in a causal interven-tion learning task. We find that patterns in belief updating bi-ases are predictive of decision making patterns in tasks where people must make interventions learn about the structure of a causal system.