A hard to read font reduces the causality bias

Marcos Díaz-Lago and Helena Matute

Judgment and Decision Making, 2019, vol. 14, issue 5, 547-554

Abstract: Previous studies have demonstrated that fluency affects judgment and decision-making. The purpose of the present research was to investigate the effect of perceptual fluency in a causal learning task that usually induces an illusion of causality in non-contingent conditions. We predicted that a reduction of fluency could improve accuracy in the detection of non-contingency and, therefore, could be used to debias illusory perceptions of causality. Participants were randomly assigned to either an easy-to-read or a hard-to-read condition. Our results showed a strong bias (i.e., overestimation) of causality in those participants who performed the non-contingent task in the easy-to-read font, which replicated the standard causality bias effect. This effect was reduced when the same task was presented in a hard-to-read font. Overall, our results provide evidence for a reduction of the causality bias when presenting the problem in a hard-to-read font. This suggests that perceptual fluency affects causal judgments.

Date: 2019
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