| Summary: | 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.
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