What causal conditional reasoning tells us about people's understanding of causality

Beller, Sieghard; Kuhnmünch, Gregory

doi:10.1080/13546780701319122

Cited by 21 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…The confirmatory results concerning the exhaustivity and equivalence principle converge with recent evidence from the causal domain (Beller & Kuhnmu¨nch, 2007). From this we can conclude that deontic norms and causal relations are interpreted along similar lines, suggesting some interesting cross-domain commonalities.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 80%

“…The reformulation data showed that people choose a biconditional phrasing of the respective deontic norms reflecting the equivalence principle. Taken together, the deontic data from the two experiments cover all three phenomena that are predicted by the dual source approach (Beller & Spada, 2003): The data demonstrate content competence, particularly in the pure deontic inference tasks, content effects in the deontic conditional inference tasks, and form competence in the reformulation tasks, as observed in other content domains before (Beller & Kuhnmu¨nch, 2007;Beller & Spada, 2003;Neth & Beller, 1999). Two sources for answers that deviate from the deontic predictions have already been discussed at several places throughout this paper: the difference between weak and strong deontic statements and their formulation as conditionals.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 87%

“…And if participants could imagine an additionally necessary antecedent, then their answers showed a reversed conditional pattern (DA and AC were endorsed, MP and MT were not). People's inferences were thus mediated by the perceived necessity and sufficiency of the precondition of the deontic regulation (analogous to findings in other domains, e.g., Beller & Kuhnmu¨nch, 2007;Byrne, 1989;Neth & Beller, 1999).…”

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confidence: 80%

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Deontic norms, deontic reasoning, and deontic conditionals

Beller

2008

Thinking & Reasoning

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 80%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 87%

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confidence: 80%

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Deontic norms, deontic reasoning, and deontic conditionals

Beller

2008

Thinking & Reasoning

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“…(Nickerson, 1980, p. 117) The idea that people process information in two distinctly different ways has many proponents among cognitive psychologists. The two types are referred to variously as intuitive (or heuristic) and analytic, or simply Type 1 and Type 2, or System 1 and System 2 (Beller & Kuhnmünch, 2007;Evans & Over, 2004;Hammond, 1978;Reyna, 2004;Sloman, 2002;Wason & Evans, 1975). The first type of process is described as preconscious, fast, automatic, heuristic, and pragmatic, and the second as conscious, slow, deliberate, analytic, and abstract.…”

Section: Strategies In Target Searchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Five down, Absquatulated: Crossword puzzle clues to how the mind works

Nickerson

2011

Psychon Bull Rev

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Doing crossword puzzles is a popular pastime; no one knows how many people do them, but estimates go as high as 50 million or more in the United States alone. Success at crossword puzzles taxes several aspects of memory and cognition. The purpose of this article is to consider hints that crosswords provide and questions that they prompt regarding how the mind works. Implicated topics include word associations, lexical memory search, semantic priming, the sparseness of word space, list generation, the feeling of knowing and of not knowing, mental aging, and the crossword puzzle as a vehicle for studying cognition.

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“…There is a great deal of evidence that people tend to accept the invited conclusion for the MP (and the MT) inference, which is the logically appropriate response, unless some form of counterexample to the conditional relation is available (Beller & Kuhnmünch, 2007;Byrne, 1989;Cummins, 1995;Cummins, Lubart, Alksnis, & Rist, 1991;De Neys, Schaeken, & d'Ydewalle, 2002;Markovits & Potvin, 2001). Geiger and Oberauer (2007) examined an important question concerning the way in which evidence contradicting the truth of a given major premise is processed and its effect on the MP and MT inferences.…”

Section: Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Conditional reasoning, frequency of counterexamples, and the effect of response modality

2010

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Understanding the nature and the processes involved in how people make inferences is a critical question in cognitive psychology. Unfortunately, there is currently no consensus as to what is involved in the inferential process. Complicating the situation is the fact that there is no uniform definition of what an inferential task is; current competing models both suggest and use very different task paradigms. Interpreting the consequent results is thus difficult, since despite the identical labeling of tasks, there is no guarantee that participants necessarily deploy the same processes when important parameters of inferential tasks are varied.In the present article, we concentrate on conditional reasoning, which involves making inferences with a given major premise of the form "P implies Q" and one of four possible minor premises. Modus ponens (MP) is the logical principle that involves reasoning with the premises "P implies Q and P is true" and leads to the logically correct conclusion "Q is true." Modus tollens (MT) involves reasoning with the premises "P implies Q and Q is false" and leads to the logically correct conclusion "P is false." These two principles are valid logical forms, since they both lead to a single logically correct conclusion. Affirmation of the consequent (AC) involves reasoning with the premises "P implies Q and Q is true." Denial of the antecedent (DA) involves reasoning with the premises "P implies Q and P is false." In both cases, the implied conclusions-"P is true" for AC and "Q is false" for DA-are not logically correct. Neither of these forms leads to a single logically correct conclusion, and the correct response would be to deny the implied (biconditional) conclusion in both cases.Currently, there are two major theories that attempt to explain how people make conditional inferences and what kinds of processes they use to do so. Mental model theory (Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 1991 supposes that reasoners will generate a representation of the premises using symbolic tokens. Tokens represent classes of possibilities, and a conclusion will be accepted if there is no counterexample available in the representation. This theory is constructed specifically to explain reasoning on standard deductive tasks, which generally require a dichotomous response (i.e., a conclusion must be judged as certain or as uncertain). Probabilistic theories suppose that a key factor in making a conditional inference is the subjective conditional probability of the conclusion given the premises (Oaksford, Chater, & Larkin, 2000). Importantly, people are assumed to hold variable degrees of belief in conditional statements, which clearly has an impact on the strength of the inferences that they are prepared to make. These theories are constructed specifically to explain reasoning on a probabilistic inference task, in which a natural response is one that is on a scale from unbelievable to believable.Of course, the simplest way of reconciling these two theories would be to postulate the existence of two sep- 485© 2010 ...

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What causal conditional reasoning tells us about people's understanding of causality

Cited by 21 publications

References 38 publications

Deontic norms, deontic reasoning, and deontic conditionals

Deontic norms, deontic reasoning, and deontic conditionals

Five down, Absquatulated: Crossword puzzle clues to how the mind works

Conditional reasoning, frequency of counterexamples, and the effect of response modality

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