Murphy, R. A.
University of Oxford
The Illusory Correlation in psychology refers to a class of phenomenon in which people judge relationships to exist where some normative measures suggest none does. This effect has been suggested to reflect a bias in information processing. I will discuss several experiments with specific relevance to how we develop our beliefs about minority social groups. According to some theories our dislike of minority groups is a natural by-product of an attentional processes biased towards unusual events (Hamilton & Gifford, 1974). A cognitive associative account originally developed to account for Pavlovian conditioning (Rescorla and Wagner, 1972), that also predicts a range of correlation and causal learning phenomenon, predicts that any bias is temporary and pre-asymptotic. We report two sets of experiments one designed to test the effect of more experience, and a second designed to assess the effect of changes in event rates. A related prediction of the associative account is that this learning is the result of an error correction principle guided by a negative evaluative response which, according to several theories of localized brain function, should result in certain neural signatures. We discuss an experiment with fMRI responses to explore this prediction.