CAREER: Causal Reasoning in Daily Life and its Role in Science Literacy

University Of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

When making decisions to improve their lives, people must be able to keep track of their prior experiences to infer causal relations. For example, consider a person learning how their daily routines influence their productivity at work, or learning how their style of interacting with their child influences their child's behavior, or whether exercise improves their mood. These examples involve a person collecting a set of experiences and drawing a conclusion about the causal influence of their choices, which requires sophisticated memory and reasoning abilities. The overall scientific objective of this research is to understand how individuals remember their experiences and come to accurate conclusions about causal influence (e.g., whether exercise improves an individual person's mood). If individuals' conclusions are fairly inaccurate, it would imply that they should be wary of making important decisions in their lives merely from memory. Causal reasoning is also important in science literacy. For this reason, the overall educational objective of this project is to create online tutorials for college students to teach them how to interpret and design research studies so that they learn to value scientific research for making decisions in their own lives. The scientific objective of understanding whether individuals can accurately learn from their memories of prior experiences will be tested in a series of experiments implemented via smartphone that last 20 days. Each day participants will receive information on their smartphone pertaining to two events (e.g., hypothetically whether they exercised, and whether their mood is good or bad). At the end of the 20 days, they will make a judgment about whether one event has a causal influence on the other. The accuracy of participants' judgments and their memories for the 20 days will be assessed, as well as the relationships between the judgments, long-term memories, and working memory capacity. Though experiments on causal inference have been conducted in the past, they have primarily been conducted over a couple minutes, rather than across 20 days, limiting the ability to understand how people engage in causal reasoning in their own lives across long timespans. The educational objective of teaching college students how to interpret and design research studies will be achieved through a series of publically-available online interactive tutorials. Students will learn how to discriminate between science and pseudoscience, to identify mischaracterized and hyperbolic scientific claims, to accurately infer causal relations in their own lives, and to design research studies that optimize the ability to infer causal relations.