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

在做出改善生活的决定时，人们必须能够追踪他们之前的经历来推断因果关系。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孩子的行为，或者锻炼是否能改善他们的情绪。这些例子涉及到一个人收集一系列的经验，并得出关于他们的选择的因果影响的结论，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体如何记住他们的经历，并得出关于因果影响的准确结论（例如，运动是否能改善个人的情绪）。如果个人的结论相当不准确，那就意味着他们应该警惕仅仅凭记忆在生活中做出重要决定。因果推理在科学素养中也很重要。因此，本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性研究，使他们学会在自己的生活中做出决策时重视科学研究。研究人员将通过智能手机进行一系列持续20天的实验，以了解个人是否能够准确地从他们对以往经历的记忆中学习。参与者每天都会在智能手机上收到与两件事有关的信息（例如，假设他们是否锻炼，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有因果影响。评估20天内参与者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。尽管过去已经进行过因果推理的实验，但它们主要是在几分钟内进行的，而不是在20天内进行的，这限制了理解人们在长时间内如何在自己的生活中进行因果推理的能力。通过一系列公开的在线互动教程，教授大学生如何解释和设计研究性研究的教育目标将得以实现。学生将学习如何区分科学和伪科学，识别错误的和夸张的科学主张，在自己的生活中准确地推断因果关系，并设计研究，优化推断因果关系的能力。

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.