Persuading and dissuading by conditional argument☆

Thompson, Valerie A.; Evans, Jonathan St. B. T.; Handley, Simon J.

doi:10.1016/j.jml.2005.03.001

Cited by 72 publications

(50 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…The theory of utility conditionals (Bonnefon, 2009) was developed to predict the inferences that people draw from conditional sentences featuring valued actions and consequences (Bonnefon, Girotto, & Legrenzi, 2012;Bonnefon & Hilton, 2004;Bonnefon & Sloman, in press;Corner, Hahn, & Oaksford, 2011;Evans, Neilens, Handley, & Over, 2008;Haigh, Stewart, Wood, & Connell, 2011;Ohm & Thompson, 2004;Thompson, Evans, & Handley, 2005). For our current purpose, we are mostly interested in the systematic notation scheme that the theory affords.…”

Section: Utility Conditionalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Utility templates for the interpretation of conditional statements

Bonnefon

Haigh

Stewart

2013

Journal of Memory and Language

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People often use conditional statements to describe configurations of agents, actions and valued consequences. The article postulates the existence of utility templates, a special subset of these configurations that exert strong constraints on interpretation. A completion survey identified four potential templates, and four experiments documented their characteristic effects: When a situation is close enough to a template, people interpret ambiguous information or reinterpret current information in such a way that their understanding of the situation fits the template. A process explanation of these effects is considered, which allows for the principled generation of other templates, and offers a possible reformulation of the findings within the framework of relevance theory. Utility templates 3 Utility Templates for the Interpretation of Conditional StatementsPeople use conditional sentences when describing actions, their preconditions, and their consequences. Oftentimes, these actions and consequences matter, in the sense that they have value or utility to various agents:(1) a. If she praises him, he will support her.b. If I hire you, I do you a favor.c. If she harasses him, she will be fired.d. If you leave me, I will be crushed.The conditionals above feature various arrangements of agents, actions, and values of these actions. For example, Conditional (1-a) says that an agent x will do something positive for another agent y, provided that y does something positive for x. Many other arrangements of agents, actions and values are possible, of which Conditionals (1-a-d) offer but a small sample. Our contention in this article, though, is that some of these arrangements have the special status of utility templates that guide and constrain interpretation. Utility templates are scripts, schemas that help people make sense of situations where various agents perform valued actions. More precisely, we argue that whenever it is possible, people will interpret or re-interpret a conditional sentence in order to make it coincide with one of their utility templates. Consider for example Conditional (2), in which the then-clause features a non-verb whose meaning has to be inferred:(2) If Alice supports Bob, Bob will yorb her.We will argue that such a conditional prompts people to activate a Social Contract utility template, from which they infer that Alice likes to be yorbed. If, on the contrary, they are Utility templates 4 informed that Alice dislikes being yorbed, the same utility template should lead them to infer that Bob dislikes being supported by Alice.In order to flesh out our proposal, we will take advantage of the theory of utility conditionals (Bonnefon, 2009), which offers a convenient notation to represent the arrangement of agents, actions and values packed in a conditional sentence. After we have introduced this notation, we consider the most natural candidate as a utility template, the Social Contract illustrated in (1-a). We then report data from a sentence completion survey that helped us identif...

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Section: Utility Conditionalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Utility templates for the interpretation of conditional statements

Bonnefon

Haigh

Stewart

2013

Journal of Memory and Language

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“…Recent work on conditionals has focused on the role they play in modifying listeners' beliefs (see, e.g., Thompson, Evans, & Handley, 2005). For example, the conditional…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Iffy beliefs: Conditional thinking and belief change

et al. 2007

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The ability to entertain possibilities and draw inferences about them is essential to human intelligence. We examine the hypothesis that conditional if-then statements trigger a mental simulation process in which people suppose the antecedent (if statement) to be true and evaluate the consequent (then statement) in that context. On the assumption that supposing an event to be true increases belief that the event has occurred or will occur, this hypothesis is consistent with the claim that evaluating a conditional will heighten belief in its antecedent more than in its consequent. Two experiments, employing conditionals of the form If animal A has property X, then animal B will have property X, in which X was a property that people could not readily relate to the animals, supported this claim. The effect was stronger following the evaluation of conditionals with dissimilar animal categories.

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“…In this way, SSAs are similar to conditional dissuasions, in which an undesirable consequence is offered as a disincentive to act on the initial proposal (cf. Thompson, Evans, & Handley, 2005). The proposed illocutionary function of SSAs is uncontroversial among theorists, regardless of whether this type of argument is viewed as a fallacy.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…However, there is currently no direct psychological evidence that people do actually infer the speaker's or writer's opposition to the initial proposal. This type of inference requires the recipient of a SSA to simultaneously reason from their own perspective, but also from the perspective of the speaker (Thompson et al 2005), a process that may be far from trivial in light of evidence demonstrating that even neurotypical adults can be fallible when it comes to mentally representing the basic beliefs, desires, and intentions of others (e.g., Birch & Bloom, 2007).In this article, we address this gap in the literature by examining what the utterance of a SSA reveals to a recipient about the attitudes of the speaker. We propose that the SSA is treated as a form of consequential, dissuasive argument that implies the speaker's desire to avoid a proposed action (cf.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…We propose that the SSA is treated as a form of consequential, dissuasive argument that implies the speaker's desire to avoid a proposed action (cf. Bonnefon & Hilton, 2004;Thompson et al 2005;Walton, 2015). Using a set of 24 novel SSAs, we first present empirical evidence for a common intuition, namely that SSAs imply the speaker's opposition to the initial proposal (A).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Slippery slope arguments imply opposition to change

2016

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Slippery slope arguments (SSAs) of the form if A, then C describe an initial proposal (A) and a predicted, undesirable consequence of this proposal (C) (e.g., BIf cannabis is ever legalized, then eventually cocaine will be legalized, too^). Despite SSAs being a common rhetorical device, there has been surprisingly little empirical research into their subjective evaluation and perception. Here, we present evidence that SSAs are interpreted as a form of consequentialist argument, inviting inferences about the speaker's (or writer's) attitudes. Study 1 confirmed the common intuition that a SSA is perceived to be an argument against the initial proposal (A), whereas Study 2 showed that the subjective strength of this inference relates to the subjective undesirability of the predicted consequences (C). Because arguments are rarely made out of context, in Studies 3 and 4 we examined how one important contextual factor, the speaker's known beliefs, influences the perceived coherence, strength, and persuasiveness of a SSA. Using an unobtrusive dependent variable (eye movements during reading), in Study 3 we showed that readers are sensitive to the internal coherence between a speaker's beliefs and the implied meaning of the argument. Finally, Study 4 revealed that this degree of internal coherence influences the perceived strength and persuasiveness of the argument. Together, these data indicate that SSAs are treated as a form of negative consequentialist argument. People infer that the speaker of a SSA opposes the initial proposal; therefore, SSAs are only perceived to be persuasive and conversationally relevant when the speaker's attitudes match this inference.Keywords Slippery slope . Argumentation . Inference . Informal reasoning . Experimental pragmatics People frequently argue against relatively moderate proposals on the basis that their implementation will start a chain of events that ultimately leads to an undesirable outcome. For example, an anti-drug-use campaigner might argue that legalizing cannabis will put lawmakers on a slippery slope toward the legalization of much harder drugs, like cocaine. These socalled slippery slope arguments (SSAs) are common in everyday discourse and are frequently used in political, legal, and ethical debates (see Walton, 1992, for various examples). Despite being subjectively persuasive to some, this type of argument is often viewed as a logically fallacy (see, e.g., Tindale, 2007, for a discussion), although there is some evidence that SSAs may have a rational basis in Bayesian decision theory (Corner, Hahn, & Oaksford, 2011;Hahn & Oaksford, 2007).The prototypical SSA takes the conditional form if antecedent (A), then consequent (C), and may make explicit reference to a Bslippery slope^(see Example 1), but often this metaphor is implicit (see Example 2). These examples are of a form that Walton (2015) refers to as Bcompressed SSAs^that jump from an initial proposal to the distal consequences, leaving the intermittent steps unstated. The content and subjective strength...

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Persuading and dissuading by conditional argument☆

Cited by 72 publications

References 44 publications

Utility templates for the interpretation of conditional statements

Utility templates for the interpretation of conditional statements

Iffy beliefs: Conditional thinking and belief change

Slippery slope arguments imply opposition to change

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