Pseudoscientific Health Beliefs and the Perceived Frequency of Causal Relationships
www.mdpi.com
Sept. 23, 2023, 10 a.m.
There is a meaningful relationship between the perceived frequency of the outcome occurring in the presence and absence of the putative cause (i.e., contingency learning), and judgements of causality across a range of health beliefs, including popular complementary and alternative medicine and therapies. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of the relationship between contingency estimation and causal judgement on real-world health beliefs, in particular beliefs relating to CAM and judgements of treatment efficacy. This finding is promising as it suggests that strategies that effectively improve people’s ability to accurately infer the likelihood of recovery from an illness with and without the alternative therapy should thus change their beliefs about the efficacy of the treatment when used for that purpose.