The Role Of Causality In Bayesian Reasoning

Bayesian rules is a important theory in the decision-making study,most of the former research indicated that people often make errors in the process of Bayesian reasoning,But the results of the recent study found that human's cognitive behavior are according to the Bayesian rules.Therefore there is great implications to exploring the factors which influence Bayesian reasoning .In this study,we set three experiments to explore the role of causality in bayesian reasoning. In experiment 1,we found:causality do not affect bayesian calculation,but participants had different performance in the different premise. In experiment 2 we explored the role of causality in bayesian estimation,The result showed:The causality observably influence bayesian estimation. In the experiment 3, we evaluated the numerical equivalents of 28 Chinese verbal probabilistic expressions in first,and second we used these words to replace the numerical probability in the traditional Bayesian reasonin, The results suggested: participants in strong causality perform better than participants in low causality.