Judging interevent relations: from cause to effect and from effect to cause

Stimulus competition was studied in college students' correlational judgments in a medical decision-making setting. In accord with prior findings, subjects making cause-to-effect (predictive) judgments discounted a stimulus event that was moderately correlated with a target event when rival stimuli were more highly correlated with the effect. However, subjects making effect-to-cause (diagnostic) judgments were not at all disposed to discount a stimulus event which was moderately correlated with a target event when rival stimuli were more highly correlated with the cause. The theoretical implications of these results are considered in connection with associative and mentalistic models of causal attribution.