文章基本信息

标题：When Success Is Not Enough: The Symptom Base-Rate Can Influence Judgments of Effectiveness of a Successful Treatment
本地全文：下载
作者：Fernando Blanco ; María Manuela Moreno-Fernández ; Helena Matute 等
期刊名称：Frontiers in Psychology
电子版ISSN：1664-1078
出版年度：2020
卷号：11
页码：560273-560287
DOI：10.3389/fpsyg.2020.560273
出版社：Frontiers Media
摘要：Patients' beliefs about the effectiveness of their treatments are key to the success of any intervention. However, since these beliefs are usually formed by sequentially accumulating evidence in the form of the covariation between the treatment use and the symptoms, it is not always easy to detect when a treatment is actually working. In Experiments 1 and 2, we presented participants with a contingency learning task in which a fictitious treatment was actually effective to reduce the symptoms of fictitious patients. However, the base-rate of the symptoms was manipulated so that, for half of participants, the symptoms were very frequent before the treatment, whereas for the rest of participants, the symptoms were less frequently observed. Although the treatment was equally effective in all cases according to the objective contingency between the treatment and healings, the participants' beliefs on the effectiveness of the treatment were influenced by the base-rate of the symptoms, so that those who observed frequent symptoms before the treatment tended to produce lower judgments of effectiveness. Experiment 3 showed that participants were probably basing their judgments on an estimate of effectiveness relative to the symptom base-rate, rather than on contingency in absolute terms. Data, materials, and R scripts to reproduce the figures are publicly available at the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/emzbj/. Copyright © 2020 Blanco, Moreno-Fernández and Matute.
关键词：base-rates;causal judgment;causal learning;cognitive bias;patients’ beliefs