Contingency, causation, and adaptive inference

In contingency judgment tasks involving 2 event types, individuals weight t he a and b cells of a 2 X 2 contingency table more than the c and d cells. Some theorists have argued that they can provide normative justifications F or this weighting and that the weighting reflects simple heuristics that ar e adaptive in the real world. The authors show that, to avoid error, indivi dual judgments about real contingencies should be more subtle than these su pposedly adaptive heuristics allow.