Abstract
We make frequent decisions about how to manage our health, yet do so with information that is highly complex or received piecemeal. Causal models can provide guidance about how components of a complex system interact, yet models that provide a complete causal story may be more complex than people can reason about. Prior work has provided mixed insights into our ability to make decisions with causal models, showing that people can use them in novel domains but that they may impede decisions in familiar ones. We examine how tailoring causal information to the question at hand may aid decision making, using simple diagrams with only the relevant causal paths (Experiment 1) or those paths highlighted within a complex causal model (Experiment 2). We find that diagrams tailored to a choice improve decision accuracy over complex diagrams or prior knowledge, providing new evidence for how causal models can aid decisions.
Original language | English |
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Pages | 2437-2443 |
Number of pages | 7 |
State | Published - 2021 |
Event | 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds, CogSci 2021 - Virtual, Online, Austria Duration: 26 Jul 2021 → 29 Jul 2021 |
Conference
Conference | 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds, CogSci 2021 |
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Country/Territory | Austria |
City | Virtual, Online |
Period | 26/07/21 → 29/07/21 |
Keywords
- causal reasoning
- complexity
- decision making