Effect of outcome valence on positive and negative patterning in human causal reasoning

The importance of configural cues and whether a situation involves beneficent or maleficent outcomes was investigated in two experiments on human causal reasoning, based on experienced causal information. Participants learned positive and negative patterning discriminations involving either beneficent or maleficent outcomes in a health-reasoning task and in a social-reasoning task. With maleficent outcomes, positive patterning was consistently easier to learn than negative patterning, a positive patterning advantage that is predicted by current associative theories and commonly taken as evidence for configural cues. However, with beneficent outcomes, the two discrimination tasks were not significantly different in ease of learning, a result not predicted by current theories. The reliable positive patterning effect found with maleficent outcomes broadens the range of conditions in which the effect can be shown in causal reasoning. The novel effect of outcome valence poses an interesting theoretical challenge for attempts to account for the relation between learning about individual cues and combinations of those cues.