After this, therefore because of this: One way of jumping to conclusions

The post-hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy, i.e. attributing causality uncritically to a temporal sequence due to the contiguity of events, represents a common means of jumping to conclusions. In this paper the measure of uncritical acceptance of others’ commitment of this fallacy in population samples, ranging from 10th grade pupils to practising teachers, was examined in three countries. It was found that only a minority of the secondary, undergraduate, and student teacher samples rejected such causal attributions spontaneously, while the majority of the teachers did so. However, when explicitly directed to evaluate the conclusions, such rejections doubled and even trebled. It was suggested that teachers and their teachers might achieve better results by dealing explicitly with the notion of ex-posteriori causal attributions and the introduction of the ideas of necessary vs sufficient conditions within that framework. Pupils/students should be able to make use of these ideas, both independently and spontaneously.