When learning about the joint occurrence of different variables, individuals often manifest biases in the associations they infer. In some cases, they infer an association when none is present in the observed sample. In other cases, they infer an association that is contrary to the one that is in fact observed. These illusory correlations are often interpreted as being the byproduct of selective processing or as the outcome of an "illogical" pseudocontingency heuristic. More recently, a normative account of illusory correlations has been proposed, according to which they can be given a normative underpinning in terms of an application of Laplace's Rule of Succession. The present work will discuss the empirical and theoretical limitations associated with this normative account, and argue for its dismissal. As an alternative, we propose a normative account that casts illusory correlations as the expected outcome of a Bayesian reasoner relying on marginal frequencies. We show that this account succeeds in capturing the qualitative patterns found in a corpus of published studies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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虚幻相关性的规范说明。

在了解不同变量的联合出现时，个人通常会在他们推断的关联中表现出偏见。在某些情况下，当观察到的样本中不存在任何关联时，它们会推断出关联。在其他情况下，他们推断出与实际观察到的关联相反的关联。这些虚幻的相关性通常被解释为选择性处理的副产品或“不合逻辑”的伪偶然性启发式的结果。最近，已经提出了对虚幻相关性的规范性解释，根据该理论，可以根据拉普拉斯继承规则的应用为它们提供规范性基础。目前的工作将讨论与这种规范性说明相关的经验和理论限制，并主张将其驳回。作为备选，我们提出了一个规范的解释，将虚幻的相关性作为依赖于边际频率的贝叶斯推理器的预期结果。我们表明，该帐户成功地捕获了已发表研究语料库中发现的定性模式。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2021 APA，保留所有权利）。