Revising Causal Beliefs
Clare R. Walsh, Steven A. Sloman · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2004
The aim of our studies is to examine how contradictions affect causal beliefs. For example, the discovery that your colleague Mark who has been following diet A suffers from iron deficiency may lead you to revise your belief that diet A provides a sufficient supply of iron. Would you also revise your belief that it causes you to lose weight? Experiment 1 shows that our belief that Mark will lose weight is reduced after encountering the contradiction. Experiment 2 shows that people are also less likely to believe that others will lose weight. The results suggest that people resolve contradictions by generating explanations that revise their causal model. Belief Revision As we go through life, we are constantly changing our beliefs. We give up old attitudes and we add new ones.