Diversity-Based Reasoning in Children

Heit, Evan; Hahn, Ulrike

doi:10.1006/cogp.2001.0757

Cited by 82 publications

(81 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…The counterintuitiveness of this result may reflect a general failure to appreciate the cognitive benefits of diversity, a failure that may also explain the results of Experiments 3 and 4. But before drawing too bleak a conclusion from our results, it should be pointed out that they clash with a large literature showing that adults and even children routinely take diversity into account in a variety of tasks (see, for instance, Hahn, Bailey, & Elvin, 2005;Osherson, Smith, Wilkie & Lopez, 1990;Heit & Hahn, 2001). A possible explanation for our discrepant findings is that participants may have inferred that when the audience was more diverse, the scope of the arguments was wider, which would make the expertise of the various audience members potentially less relevant to the evaluation of the argument.…”

Section: Resultscontrasting

confidence: 71%

Evaluating arguments from the reaction of the audience

Mercier¹,

Strickland²

2012

Thinking & Reasoning

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In studying how lay people evaluate arguments, psychologists have typically focused on logical form and content. This emphasis has masked an important yet underappreciated aspect of everyday argument evaluation: social cues to argument strength. Here we focus on the ways in which observers evaluate arguments by the reaction they evoke in an audience. This type of evaluation is likely to occur either when people are not privy to the content of the arguments or when they are not expert enough to appropriately evaluate it. Four experiments explore cues that participants might take into account in evaluating arguments from the reaction of the audience. They demonstrate that participants can use audience motivation, expertise, and size as clues to argument quality. By contrast we find no evidence that participants take audience diversity into account. In press Thinking and Reasoning Abstract.In studying how lay people evaluate arguments, psychologists have typically focused on logical form and content. This emphasis has masked an important yet underappreciated aspect of every day argument evaluation: social cues to argument strength. Here, we focus on the ways in which observers evaluate arguments by the reaction they evoke in an audience. This type of evaluation is likely to occur either when people are not privy to the content of the arguments or when they are not expert enough to appropriately evaluate it. Four experiments explore cues that participants might take into account in evaluating arguments from the reaction of the audience. They demonstrate that participants can use audience motivation, expertise and size as clues to argument quality. By contrast, we find no evidence that participants take audience diversity into account.Keywords: argument evaluation, argumentation, audience, social cues.Arguments can be evaluated in several ways. Typically, their form and content is the subject of scrutiny. Their logical validity can be assessed, and this has been the topic of logic. Their content also matters: minimally, if the premises are known to be false, the argument loses its appeal. Straddling form and content, argumentation schemes-appeal to authority, argument from example, etc. Most attention in experimental psychology has focused on the first way to evaluate arguments. The psychology of reasoning has mostly focused on testing people's ability to detect the logical validity of arguments, or to follow other normative guidelines such as Bayes' rule (Evans, 2002;Hahn & Oaksford, 2007). Studies of persuasion and attitude change have evaluated the impact of numerous factors, including the strength of different arguments (Petty & Wegener, 1998). By contrast, little attention has been devoted to the evaluation of arguments by way of the reaction of their intended audience.Yet we are often unable to evaluate the form or content of arguments. In some cases, we are simply not privy to the arguments and the reaction of the audience is the only clue we have. In other cases the arguments are available, but we don...

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Section: Resultscontrasting

confidence: 71%

Evaluating arguments from the reaction of the audience

Mercier¹,

Strickland²

2012

Thinking & Reasoning

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“…An alternate perspective, however, suggests that apparent developmental changes in inductive reasoning result from limitations in young children's knowledge base (e.g., Carey, 1985;Heit & Hahn, 2001). To examine this possibility, Heit and Hahn (2001) designed studies that involved items and properties thought to be more familiar to young children.…”

Section: Children's Criteria For Evaluating Samplesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…On these questions, children reliably responded that the target doll belonged to the character that owned the diverse set of dolls. Based on these data, Heit and Hahn (2001) suggest that young children can engage in diversity-based reasoning under simplified conditions.These findings demonstrate that young children can recognize sample diversity and sort evidence based on diversity. In our view, however, they do not clearly indicate that young children view diverse samples as a stronger basis for induction.…”

mentioning

confidence: 93%

“…Gutheil and Gelman (1997) replicated these negative diversity effects among children in a series of studies focusing on basic level animal categories (see also Rhodes, Gelman, & Brickman, in press). Based on these findings, the authors of these studies proposed that young children do not attend to sample diversity to evaluate evidence, and therefore, that there are important developmental changes in the mechanisms that support inductive reasoning.An alternate perspective, however, suggests that apparent developmental changes in inductive reasoning result from limitations in young children's knowledge base (e.g., Carey, 1985;Heit & Hahn, 2001). To examine this possibility, Heit and Hahn (2001) designed studies that involved items and properties thought to be more familiar to young children.…”

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Sample diversity and premise typicality in inductive reasoning: Evidence for developmental change

2008

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Evaluating whether a limited sample of evidence provides a good basis for induction is a critical cognitive task. We hypothesized that whereas adults evaluate the inductive strength of samples containing multiple pieces of evidence by attending to the relations among the exemplars (e.g., sample diversity), six-year-olds would attend to the degree to which each individual exemplar in a sample independently appears informative (e.g., premise typicality). To test these hypotheses, participants were asked to select between diverse and non-diverse samples to help them learn about basic-level animal categories. Across various between-subject conditions (N = 133), we varied the typicality present in the diverse and non-diverse samples. We found that adults reliably selected to examine diverse over non-diverse samples, regardless of exemplar typicality, six-year-olds preferred to examine samples containing typical exemplars, regardless of sample diversity, and nine-year-olds were somewhat in the midst of this developmental transition.Inductive reasoning is central to human learning, as most of the knowledge we possess is acquired via inductive inferences rather than through direct instruction or observation. Thus, there has been considerable interest in understanding the basis of inductive reasoning processes throughout development. The question of how inductive reasoning skills develop relates to a major theoretical debate in the field of cognitive development regarding the relative contributions to development of knowledge enrichment and of conceptual change. Do young children generalize knowledge using the same reasoning mechanisms as adults do (sometimes arriving at different conclusions due to limitations in their knowledge base), or does young children's inductive methodology differ systematically from the adult approach (e.g., Carey, 1985;Heit, 2000;Viale & Osherson, 2002)? Within this framework, the goal of the present research was to examine developmental changes in how individuals approach a key challenge of inductive reasoning-determining whether limited evidence provides a strong sample on which to base broader generalizations. Adults' Criteria for Evaluating SamplesAs discussed by Heit (2000), adults have different strategies for evaluating samples that contain single versus multiple pieces of evidence. For example, to evaluate whether a single bird is informative about all birds, adults usually consider how typical the given exemplar is of the category "birds," and base generalizations on typical exemplars (e.g., robins) more than atypical exemplars (e.g., penguins, Rips, 1975 Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the co...

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“…This diversity principle has been highlighted in the philosophy of science (see for example, Bacon, 1898;Carnap, 1950;Nagel 1939;Horwich, 1982;Howson & Urbach, 1993) and there has been considerable experimental work examining the extent to which it is adhered to in our every day judgments by both adults (Osherson, Smith, Wilkie, Lopez & Shafir, 1990;Lopez, 1995; Lopez, Atran, Coley, Medin & Schaffer, 1978) and children (Carey, 1985;Lopez, Gelman, Gutheil, & Smith, 1992;Gutheil & Gelman, 1997;Heit & Hahn, 2001). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Further attempts to clarify the importance of category variability for categorisation

Perlman

Hahn

Edwards

et al. 2012

Journal of Cognitive Psychology

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This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link:http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/4687/ Link to published version: http://dx.doi.org/10. 1080/20445911.2011.613818 Copyright and reuse: City Research Online aims to make research outputs of City, University of London available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the author(s) and/or copyright holders. URLs from City Research Online may be freely distributed and linked to. AbstractThe issue of how category variability affects classification of novel instances is an important one for assessing theories of categorization, yet previous research cannot provide a compelling conclusion. In five experiments we re-examine some of the factors which are thought to affect participant performance. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants almost always classified the test item as belonging to the high-variability category. By contrast, in Experiment 3 we employed an alternative experimental paradigm, where the difference in variability of the two categories was less salient. In that case, participants tended to classify a test item as belonging to the low-variability category. Two additional experiments (4 and 5) explored in detail the differences between Experiments 1, 2 on the one hand, and 3 on the other. Some insight into the underlying psychological processes can be provided by computational models of categorization, and we focus on the continuous version of Anderson's (1991) Rational Model, which has not been explored before in this context. The model predicts that test instances exactly halfway between the prototypes of two categories should be classified into the more variable category, consistent with the bulk of empirical findings. We also provided a comparison with a slightly reduced version of the Generalized Context Model (GCM) to show that its predictions are consistent with those from the Rational Model, for our stimulus sets. Inter-item variability affects behavior in a number of related areas. In categorization, the problem is how category variability influences item classification. This is an important issue both because previous research has led to somewhat conflicting findings and because computational models of categorization make strong predictions. We discuss some of the general literature on variability and proceed to present the relevant data from categorization, which is the focus of the present study, and corresponding computational analyses.Variability plays a central role in studies of human inductive inference, where it has been argued that, all other things being equal, more variable, diverse evidence should give rise to stronger inductive arguments. This diversity principle has been highlighted in the philosophy of science (see for example, Bacon, 1898;Carnap, 1950;Nagel 1939;Horwich, 1982;Howson & Urbach, 1993) and there has been considerable experimental work examining the extent to which it is adhered to in our every day judgments...

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Diversity-Based Reasoning in Children

Cited by 82 publications

References 19 publications

Evaluating arguments from the reaction of the audience

Evaluating arguments from the reaction of the audience

Sample diversity and premise typicality in inductive reasoning: Evidence for developmental change

Further attempts to clarify the importance of category variability for categorisation

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