David A Lagnado

Biographic Data

ID2749844
NAMEDavid A Lagnado
GIVEN NAMESDavid A
FAMILY NAMELagnado
SIGNATURELAGNADO D A
AFFILIATIONSUniversity College London
ORCID0000-0002-6845-8830
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS20
TOTAL CITATIONS9
AUTHOR COUNT20
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2008
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX2

  • Negative anecdotes reduce policy support

    Open AccessAmy Rodger, Greta Arancia Sanna et al.ARTICLEBehavioural Public Policy2026References: 14

    Public support is crucial for the success of policy interventions that aim to change behaviour. While communicating evidence of policy effectiveness can increase support, it remains unclear which type of evidence is most effective. Statistical evidence is often seen as objective and persuasive, yet personal anecdotes can strongly influence beliefs. We examined how statistical and anecdotal evidence affect policy perceptions. In three online exper…

  • Belief updating in the face of misinformation

    Open AccessGreta Arancia Sanna, David Lagnado et al.ARTICLECognition2025

    This paper investigates the process of belief updating in the presence of contradictory and potentially misleading information, focusing on the impact of source reliability. Across four experiments, we examined how individuals revise their beliefs when confronted with retracted information and varying source credibility. Experiment 1 revealed that participants discounted retracted information and reverted to their prior beliefs, in contrast to th…

  • The problem of dependency

    Open AccessToby D Pilditch, Ulrike Hahn et al.ARTICLESynthese2025References: 59

    It is a wide-spread assumption that multiple pieces of evidence, whether they involve measurements or testimony, provide stronger evidential support when they are independent than when they are not. The standard view is that non-independence creates redundancy and leads to over-confidence (see e.g., Soll in Cogn Psychol 38(2):317–346, 1999; Nisbett and Ross in Human inference: strategies and shortcomings of social judgment. Prentice Hall, New Jer…

  • Not so simple! Causal mechanisms increase preference for complex explanations

    Open AccessJeffrey C Zemla, Steven A Sloman et al.ARTICLECognition2023

  • Drawing conclusions

    Open AccessAlice Liefgreen, David A LagnadoARTICLECognition2023

  • Making a positive difference

    Open AccessTobias Gerstenberg, David A Lagnado et al.ARTICLECognition2023

  • Le raisonnement probatoire et la « mise en récit » des preuves

    Marion Vorms, David Lagnado et al.ARTICLEDroit et société2022References: 2

    Selon le story-model , théorie psychologique du raisonnement et de la prise de décision des jurés proposée par Nancy Pennington et Reid Hastie dans les années 1980, les jurés d’un procès criminel interprètent et évaluent les preuves qui leur sont présentées au moyen d’une représentation mentale des événements – un récit –, plutôt que par un calcul combinatoire du poids des éléments à charge et à décharge. C’est avant tout la cohérence et la compl…

  • Straight Choices

    Ben R Newell, Benjamin R Newell et al.BOOKStraight Choices2022

  • Motive on the mind

    Open AccessAlice Liefgreen, Sami R Yousif et al.ARTICLECognition2021

  • Causal judgments about atypical actions are influenced by agents' epistemic states

    Open AccessLara Kirfel, David Lagnado et al.ARTICLECognition2021

  • Explaining the Evidence

    Open AccessDavid A LagnadoBOOKExplaining the Evidence2021

    How do we make sense of complex evidence? What are the cognitive principles that allow detectives to solve crimes, and lay people to puzzle out everyday problems? To address these questions, David Lagnado presents a novel perspective on human reasoning. At heart, we are causal thinkers driven to explain the myriad ways in which people behave and interact. We build mental models of the world, enabling us to infer patterns of cause and effect, link…

  • Strategies for selecting and evaluating information

    Open AccessAlice Liefgreen, Toby D Pilditch et al.ARTICLECognitive Psychology2020

  • The propensity interpretation of probability and diagnostic split in explaining away

    Open AccessMarko Tešić, Alice Liefgreen et al.ARTICLECognitive Psychology2020

  • Dependencies in evidential reports

    Open AccessToby D Pilditch, Ulrike Hahn et al.ARTICLECognition2020

  • Causality influences children’s and adults’ experience of temporal order

    Emma C Tecwyn, Christos Bechlivanidis et al.ARTICLEDevelopmental Psychology2020References: 3

    Although it has long been known that time is a cue to causation, recent work with adults has demonstrated that causality can also influence the experience of time. In causal reordering (Bechlivanidis & Lagnado, 2013, 2016) adults tend to report the causally consistent order of events rather than the correct temporal order. However, the effect has yet to be demonstrated in children. Across four preregistered experiments, 4- to 10-year-old children…

  • The Moral Foundations of Human Rights Attitudes

    Open AccessDominic Stolerman, David Lagnado et al.ARTICLEPolitical Psychology2020Cited by: 3References: 42

    Human rights are claimed to be innate and based on moral principles. Human rights attitudes have been shown to be related to political ideology, but there have been few studies investigating their relationship with morality. Using moral foundations theory, we examine whether morals can predict human rights attitudes across two studies. The first study used questionnaires to show that human rights are based exclusively on individualizing moral fou…

  • Causality, the critical but often ignored component guiding us through a world of uncertainties in risk assessment

    Martin Neil, Norman Fenton et al.ARTICLEJournal of Risk Research2019Cited by: 5References: 1

    The idea of uncertainty analyses, which typically involves quantification, is to protect practitioners and consumers from drawing unsubstantiated conclusions from scientific assessments of risk. The importance of causal modelling in this process – along with the inference methods associated with such modelling – is now increasingly widely recognized; yet organizations responsible for policy on uncertainty and risk in critical domains have general…

  • There aren't plenty more fish in the sea

    Open AccessMilena Nikolic, David A LagnadoARTICLEBritish Journal of Psychology2015Cited by: 1References: 29

    The current research investigated how lay representations of the causes of an environmental problem may underlie individuals' reasoning about the issue. Naïve participants completed an experiment that involved two main tasks. The causal diagram task required participants to depict the causal relations between a set of factors related to overfishing and to estimate the strength of these relations. The counterfactual task required participants to j…

  • Feelings of control

    Open AccessJames W Moore, David Lagnado et al.ARTICLECognition2009

  • Judgments of cause and blame

    Open AccessDavid A Lagnado, Shelley ChannonARTICLECognition2008