Illusory Correlations as the Outcome of Experiential Sampling

Individuals are typically more likely to repeatedly select alternatives they have a positive impression of. This paper shows that this sequential sampling feature of the information acquisition process might lead to the emergence of illusory correlation between attributes of multi-attribute alternatives. This suggests an alternative explanation for illusory correlation that does not rely on biased information processing. The model also shows that illusory correlation can emerge even when the attributes are independently distributed and the distributions are not skewed.