Opposites in Reasoning Processes: Do We Use Them More Than We Think, but Less Than We Could?

Abstract

Our aim in this paper is to contribute toward acknowledging the general role of opposites as an organizing principle in the human mind. We support this claim in relation to human reasoning by collecting evidence from various studies which shows that “thinking in opposites” is not only involved in formal logical thinking, but can also be applied in both deductive and inductive reasoning, as well as in problem solving. We also describe the results of a series of studies which, although they have been developed within a number of different theoretical frameworks based on various methodologies, all demonstrate that giving hints or training reasoners to think in terms of opposites improves their performance in tasks in which spontaneous thinking may lead to classic biases and impasses. Since we all possess an intuitive idea of what opposites are, prompting people to “think in opposites” is something which is undoubtedly within everyone's reach and in the final section, we discuss the potential of this strategy and suggest possible future research directions of systematic testing the benefits that might arise from the use of this technique in contexts beyond those tested thus far. Ascertaining the conditions in which reasoners might benefit will also help in terms of clarifying the underlying mechanisms from the point of view, for instance, of analytical, conscious processing vs. automatic, unconscious processing.

Training People to Think in Opposites Facilitates the Falsification Process in Wason’s Rule Discovery Task

“…First, it is simple for the participants to follow a prompt to think in opposites. Opposition is implied in various reasoning processes (more than we believe-for a review, see Branchini et al 2021) and is spontaneously used in everyday reasoning to imagine alternatives to reality by both children (e.g., Beck et al 2006;Fitzgibbon et al 2019;Rafetseder et al 2010) and adults (Byrne and McEleney 2000;Byrne 2016Byrne , 2018. The fact that we find it easy to use opposites when thinking about alternatives is not surprising if we consider that opposition constitutes a basic relationship that structures human conceptual spaces (e.g., Gärdenfors 2000Gärdenfors , 2014.…”

“…Indeed, the training referred to shapes, and the participants were asked to transfer the strategy to numbers. Similarly, in the previously mentioned studies on visuospatial problem-solving (Bianchi et al 2020;Branchini et al 2015aBranchini et al , 2015bBranchini et al , 2016Branchini et al , 2021, the training referred to three visual problems, and the strategy was then applied to other visual problems. The possibility that analogical transfer might be part of the process does not weaken the premises of training, which presupposes that the reasoners will find it easy to think in opposites in a variety of situations.…”

“…This study aimed to provide a first assessment of the efficacy of training participants to think in opposites when performing Wason's 2-4-6 discovery task. There is already evidence that this strategy facilitates visuospatial problem-solving (Bianchi et al 2020;Branchini et al 2015aBranchini et al , 2015bBranchini et al , 2016Branchini et al , 2021, but it has never been applied to Wason's task. The results summarized above confirm that, in this task also, training positively impacted the participants' ability to find the correct solution.…”

“…The possibility that analogical transfer might be part of the process does not weaken the premises of training, which presupposes that the reasoners will find it easy to think in opposites in a variety of situations. The limits to the fruitful application of this strategy are yet to be empirically explored (see Branchini et al 2021;Bianchi and Branchini 2023).…”

“…The participants were advised to concentrate on all of the properties of the seed triple and then identify the opposite of these properties in order to use them to test their hypotheses. The decision to use explicit training rather than a hint was based on the results of a number of previous studies that had investigated the effects of prompting participants to think in opposites in visuospatial problem-solving (Bianchi et al 2020;Branchini et al 2015aBranchini et al , 2015bBranchini et al , 2016Branchini et al , 2021. The results of these studies, in fact, gave us a third reason to modulate the experimental task in the present study (i.e., explicit training to think in opposites).…”