CAREER: Causal Reasoning in Daily Life and its Role in Science Literacy

在做出改善生活的决定时，人们必须能够跟踪他们以前的经历，以推断因果关系。例如，考虑一个人学习他们的日常生活如何影响他们的工作效率，或者学习他们与孩子互动的方式如何影响他们的孩子的行为，或者锻炼是否会改善他们的情绪。这些例子涉及一个人收集一系列经验，并就他们的选择的因果影响得出结论，这需要复杂的记忆和推理能力。这项研究的总体科学目标是了解个人如何记忆他们的经历，并就因果影响得出准确的结论(例如，运动是否改善了个人的情绪)。如果个人的结论相当不准确，这意味着他们应该警惕仅仅根据记忆做出生活中的重要决定。因果推理在科学素养中也很重要。因此，该项目的总体教育目标是为大学生创建在线教程，教他们如何解释和设计研究研究，以便他们学会在自己的生活中做出决策时重视科学研究。了解个人是否能够准确地从先前经验中学习的科学目标将通过一系列通过智能手机实施的实验进行测试，实验持续20天。参与者每天都会在智能手机上收到关于两个事件的信息(例如，假设他们是否锻炼了，以及他们的情绪是好是坏)。在20天结束时，他们将判断一个事件是否对另一个事件具有因果影响。将评估参与者在20天内判断和记忆的准确性，以及判断、长期记忆和工作记忆容量之间的关系。尽管过去已经进行了因果推理的实验，但它们主要是在几分钟内进行的，而不是在20天内进行的，这限制了人们理解人们如何在长时间跨过生活的情况下进行因果推理的能力。教授大学生如何解释和设计研究性学习的教育目标将通过一系列公开的在线互动教程来实现。学生将学习如何区分科学和伪科学，识别错误描述和夸张的科学主张，准确推断自己生活中的因果关系，并设计优化推断因果关系能力的研究研究。

When making decisions to improve their lives, people must be able to keep track of their prior experiences to infer causal relations. For example, consider a person learning how their daily routines influence their productivity at work, or learning how their style of interacting with their child influences their child's behavior, or whether exercise improves their mood. These examples involve a person collecting a set of experiences and drawing a conclusion about the causal influence of their choices, which requires sophisticated memory and reasoning abilities. The overall scientific objective of this research is to understand how individuals remember their experiences and come to accurate conclusions about causal influence (e.g., whether exercise improves an individual person's mood). If individuals' conclusions are fairly inaccurate, it would imply that they should be wary of making important decisions in their lives merely from memory. Causal reasoning is also important in science literacy. For this reason, the overall educational objective of this project is to create online tutorials for college students to teach them how to interpret and design research studies so that they learn to value scientific research for making decisions in their own lives.The scientific objective of understanding whether individuals can accurately learn from their memories of prior experiences will be tested in a series of experiments implemented via smartphone that last 20 days. Each day participants will receive information on their smartphone pertaining to two events (e.g., hypothetically whether they exercised, and whether their mood is good or bad). At the end of the 20 days, they will make a judgment about whether one event has a causal influence on the other. The accuracy of participants' judgments and their memories for the 20 days will be assessed, as well as the relationships between the judgments, long-term memories, and working memory capacity. Though experiments on causal inference have been conducted in the past, they have primarily been conducted over a couple minutes, rather than across 20 days, limiting the ability to understand how people engage in causal reasoning in their own lives across long timespans. The educational objective of teaching college students how to interpret and design research studies will be achieved through a series of publically-available online interactive tutorials. Students will learn how to discriminate between science and pseudoscience, to identify mischaracterized and hyperbolic scientific claims, to accurately infer causal relations in their own lives, and to design research studies that optimize the ability to infer causal relations.