Toward a unified theory of human reasoning

This article presents a unified theory of human reasoning. The goal of the theory is to specify what constitutes reasoning, as opposed to other psychological processes, and to characterize the psychological distinction between inductive and deductive reasoning. The theory views reasoning as the controlled and mediated application of three processes— selective encoding, selective comparison, and selective combination—to inferential rules. The first two of these processes are essentially inductive in nature; the third is essentially deductive. The theory describes these three processes, specifies the kinds of inferential rules and their use in several reasoning tasks, and specifies the mediators that affect how well the processes can be applied to the rules. The theory is shown to apply to a variety of reasoning tasks and is compared to other theories as well.     

Children's evaluation of the certainty of another person's inductive inferences and guesses

In three studies, 5–10-year-old children and an adult comparison group judged another's certainty in making inductive inferences and guesses. Participants observed a puppet make strong inductions, weak inductions, and guesses. Participants either had no information about the correctness of the puppet's conclusion, knew that the puppet was correct, or knew that the puppet was incorrect. Children of all ages (but not adults) rated the puppet as more certain about statements the child knew to be correct than statements the child knew to be incorrect. When assessing another's certainty, children have difficulty inhibiting their own knowledge and focusing on the other's perspective. Children were more likely to differentiate between inductions and guesses when the puppet made an Incorrect Statement, but even the oldest children did not differentiate consistently. The distinction between induction and guessing appears to be only acquired gradually but is important as a contributor to more advanced forms of reasoning and epistemological understanding.     

What Do People Find Incompatible With Causal Determinism?

Four studies explored people's judgments about whether particular types of behavior are compatible with determinism. Participants read a passage describing a deterministic universe, in which everything that happens is fully caused by whatever happened before it. They then assessed the degree to which different behaviors were possible in such a universe. Other participants evaluated the extent to which each of these behaviors had various features (e.g., requiring reasoning). We assessed the extent to which these features predicted judgments about whether the behaviors were possible in a deterministic universe. Experiments 1 and 2 found that people's judgments about whether a behavior was compatible with determinism were not predicted by their judgments about whether that behavior relies on physical processes in the brain and body, is uniquely human, is unpredictable, or involves reasoning. Experiment 3, however, found that a distinction between what we call “active” and “passive” behaviors can explain people's judgments. Experiment 4 extended these findings, showing that we can measure this distinction in several ways and that it is robustly predicted by two different cues. Taken together, these results suggest that people carve up mentally guided behavior into two distinct types—understanding one type to be compatible with determinism, but another type to be fundamentally incompatible with determinism.     

Probabilistic Reasoning in Context: Socio-cultural Differences in Children’s and Adults’ Predictions about the Fulfillment of Prayers and Wishes

ABSTRACT

Children and adults appreciate that physical action is typically the conduit between individuals’ desires and the fulfillment of those desires. However, certain forms of petitionary thought – e.g., wishing and praying – are believed by many people to influence the external world and fulfill desires without direct physical action. We examine whether children’s and adults’ predictions about the occurrence of desired events differs based on: (1) the ways in which desires are expressed (wishing vs. praying), (2) whether desired events are plausible vs. impossible, and (3) participants’ religious backgrounds. Children ages 3- to 11-years (n = 144) and young adults (n = 85) were read scenarios in which a protagonist either wished or prayed for a desired event to occur. Some of the desired events could plausibly happen with ordinary human intervention and others were impossible, even with human intervention. Preschoolers often predicted that desired events would obtain; with increasing age, participants judged that fewer events would obtain. Participants’ predictions varied by the probability of the desired event – across the entire age-range participants predicted that impossible events would obtain less often than plausible events. Thus, participants’ everyday probabilistic reasoning was imported into their reasoning about the fulfillment of supernatural petitions. Children’s and adults’ religious experiences predicted their judgments that events would obtain if they had been prayed for, but not if they had been wished for. Thus, the effects of socio-cultural experience did not globally pervade children’s and adults’ probabilistic reasoning, but were specific to certain contexts about which they reasoned.     

Intuition and Reasoning: A Dual-Process Perspective

A lay definition of intuition holds that it involves immediate apprehension in the absence of reasoning. From a more technical point of view, I argue also that intuition should be seen as the contrastive of reasoning, corresponding roughly to the distinction between Type 1 (intuitive) and Type 2 (reflective) processes in contemporary dual process theories of thinking. From this perspective, we already know a great deal about intuition: It is quick, provides feelings of confidence, can reflect large amounts of information processing, and is most likely to provide accurate judgments when based on relevant experiential learning. Unlike reasoning, intuition is low effort and does not compete for central working memory resources. It provides default responses which may—or often may not—be intervened upon with high effort, reflective reasoning. Intuition has, however, been blamed for a range of cognitive biases in the psychological literatures on reasoning and decision making. The evidence indicates that with novel and abstract problems, not easily linked to previous experience, intervention with effortful reasoning is often required to avoid such biases. Hence, although it seems that intuition dominates reasoning most of the time—both in the laboratory and the real world—it can indeed be a false friend.     

Beliefs about the origins of human psychological traits

The development of children's reasoning about the origins of human psychological traits was investigated across 4 studies with a total of 316 participants ranging in age from kindergartners to 5th graders and adults. The primary methodology was a switched-at-birth task (L. A. Hirschfeld, 1995), which poses a hypothetical nature-nurture conflict. Two major issues were addressed: (a) the extent to which psychological traits are viewed as a product of environmental influence and (b) whether individuals can be primed to think about the origins of psychological traits in particular ways. Results suggest that there is an age-related increase in the tendency to make distinctions among different psychological traits and that over time, individuals come to believe that psychological traits are determined primarily by nurture. Results also show that young children's beliefs about trait origins are subject to subtle priming effects before an adultlike response pattern is seen.     

Conditional Reasoning and Emotional Experience: A Review of the Development of Counterfactual Thinking

What do human beings use conditional reasoning for? A psychological consequence of counterfactual conditional reasoning is emotional experience, in particular, regret and relief. Adults’ thoughts about what might have been influence their evaluations of reality. We discuss recent psychological experiments that chart the relationship between children’s ability to engage in conditional reasoning and their experience of counterfactual emotions. Relative to conditional reasoning, counterfactual emotions are late developing. This suggests that children need not only competence in conditional reasoning, but also to engage in this thinking spontaneously. Developments in domain general cognitive processing (the executive functions) allow children to develop from conditional reasoning to reasoning with counterfactual content and, eventually, to experiencing counterfactual emotions.     

Children's Use of Different Information Types When Learning Homophones and Nonce Words

This study examines whether 3-year-olds are able to use ontological distinctions in homophone and nonce word acquisition. In the homophone (denotation-1 present) condition, children heard stories introducing second meanings of homophones; for example, a skate (i.e., fish). Stories contained perceptual information, information about theory-based properties, or filler material. Children identified the referent from 3 drawings depicting the familiar meaning, the secondary meaning, and a distractor. In the homophone (denotation-1 absent) condition, the picture of the familiar meaning was replaced with a distractor. The nonce word condition, a control condition, was identical to the homophone (denotation-1 present) condition except that a nonce word replaced the homophone. Children were rarely able to construct a second homophone interpretation when the familiar denotation was available. Interestingly, in the remaining conditions, children used information about the animate-inanimate distinction in choosing the referent. We discuss children's use of this ontological distinction when inducing word meaning.     

Children’s attributions of beliefs to humans and God: cross-cultural evidence

The capacity to attribute beliefs to others in order to understand action is one of the mainstays of human cognition. Yet it is debatable whether children attribute beliefs in the same way to all agents. In this paper, we present the results of a false-belief task concerning humans and God run with a sample of Maya children aged 4-7, and place them in the context of several psychological theories of cognitive development. Children were found to attribute beliefs in different ways to humans and God. The evidence also speaks to the debate concerning the universality and uniformity of the development of folk-psychological reasoning.     

Identifying living and sentient kinds from dynamic information: the case of goal-directed versus aimless autonomous movement in conceptual change

To reason competently about novel entities, people must discover whether the entity is alive and/or sentient. Exactly how people make this discovery is unknown, although past researchers have proposed that young children--unlike adults--rely chiefly on whether the object can move itself. This study examined the effect of goal-directed versus aimless autonomous movement on children's and adults' attributions of biological and psychological capacities in an effort to test whether goal-directedness affects inferences across documented periods of change in biological reasoning. Half of the participants (adults, and 4-, 5-, 7-, and 10-year-olds; Ns=32) were shown videos of unfamiliar blobs moving independently and aimlessly, and the other half were shown videos of identical blobs moving identically but toward a goal. No age group was likely to attribute biological or psychological capacities to the aimless self-moving blobs. However, for 5-year-olds through adults, goal-directed movement reliably elicited life judgments, and it elicited more biological and psychological attributions overall. Adults differed from children in that goal-directed movement affected their attributions of biological properties more than their attributions of psychological properties. The results suggest that both young children and adults consider the capacity for goal-directed movement to be a decisive factor in determining whether something unfamiliar is alive, though other factors may be important in deciding whether the thing is sentient.     

A NEW LOOK AT THE SCIENCE‐AND‐RELIGION DIALOGUE

Abstract. Cognitive science is beginning to make a contribution to the science‐and‐religion dialogue by its claims about the nature of both scientific and religious knowledge and the practices such knowledge informs. Of particular importance is the distinction between folk knowledge and abstract theoretical knowledge leading to a distinction between folk science and folk religion on the one hand and the reflective, theoretical, abstract form of thought that characterizes both advanced scientific thought and sophisticated theological reasoning on the other. Both folk science and folk religion emerge from commonsense reasoning about the world, a form of reasoning bequeathed to us by the processes of natural selection. Suggestions are made about what scientists and theologians can do if they accept these claims.     

The Role of Probability and Intentionality in Preschoolers' Causal Generalizations

Three experiments examined whether preschoolers recognize that the causal properties of objects generalize to new members of the same set given either deterministic or probabilistic data. Experiment 1 found that 3- and 4-year-olds were able to make such a generalization given deterministic data but were at chance when they observed probabilistic information. Five-year-olds reliably generalized in both situations. Experiment 2 found that 4-year-olds could make some probabilistic inferences, particularly when comparing sets that had no efficacy with sets in which some members had efficacy. Children had some difficulty discriminating between completely effective sets and stochastic ones. Experiment 3 examined whether 3- and 4-year-olds could reason about probabilistic data when provided with information about the experimenter's beliefs about causal outcomes. Children who were more successful on standard false-belief measures were more likely to respond as if the data were deterministic. These data suggest that children's probabilistic inferences develop into early elementary school, but preschoolers might have some understanding of probability when reasoning about causal generalization.     

Girls' and boys' perception of mothers' intentions of using physical punishment and reasoning as discipline methods

The aim of this study was to examine Swedish children's perceptions of mothers' intentions of using physical punishment and reasoning, as well as their evaluations of the mothers as being good parents. Six- to nine-year-old children were interviewed. Children's evaluations as well as reports of mothers' intentions varied according to the type of vignette presented (discipline in response to child aggression, or in response to child non-compliance), and their own parents' childrearing attitudes. Children who said that mothers who use physical punishment were “good mothers” were more likely to have parents with more traditional childrearing attitudes, and were older. Older children also evaluated mother's use of reasoning, and perceived greater intentionality in this form of discipline, compared to younger children. No gender differences were found either for perception of intention or evaluation of the mother.     

The development of children's rule use on the balance scale task

Cognitive development can be characterized by a sequence of increasingly complex rules or strategies for solving problems. Our work focuses on the development of children's proportional reasoning, assessed by the balance scale task using Siegler's (1976, 1981) rule assessment methodology. We studied whether children use rules, whether children of different ages use qualitatively different rules, and whether rules are used consistently. Nonverbal balance scale problems were administered to 805 participants between 5 and 19 years of age. Latent class analyses indicate that children use rules, that children of different ages use different rules, and that both consistent and inconsistent use of rules occurs. A model for the development of reasoning about the balance scale task is proposed. The model is a restricted form of the overlapping waves model (Siegler, 1996) and predicts both discontinuous and gradual transitions between rules.     

不同任务类型条件下4～6年级儿童比例推理策略的表现

随机选取小学4~6年级被试86名,从辅助策略、比例推理策略的策略选择和策略效用三方面,通过五种类型的天平任务考察儿童比例推理策略的表现。结果表明:(1)儿童最常使用手指动作辅助加工基本数量信息。辅助策略的使用率随年龄增长而减少,五年级开始使用出声思维,反映出元认知能力的发展。(2)在正式学习比例知识之前,各年级儿童都能使用两种以上策略,也能根据任务难度自发产生新策略,具备策略选择的多样性和适应性。其中,三个年级均能使用定性比例推理策略(双维策略,IIIA策略,补偿策略),表明儿童初步认识了距离和重量两个维度的共变关系。此外,六年级儿童能使用"运货车策略"将冲突问题灵活地化解为简单问题。(3)儿童的错误策略表现为:在冲突任务中盲目使用补偿策略、简单策略或加法策略。(4)分层回归分析表明,在控制年龄后,儿童的一般推理能力越高,其对重量策略的依赖性越低,且可能更容易发掘距离维度的意义,其使用运货车策略的频次更多。此外,一般推理能力对解决冲突类天平任务的正确次数有正向预测作用。     

“I Was Really, Really, Really Mad!” Children's Use of Evaluative Devices in Narratives About Emotional Events

Children (ages 3, 5, and 8 years, mostly White and middle-class) were asked to tell personal experience narratives about a time when they had been happy, surprised, and mad. Their explicit emotion labels as well as their use of linguistic forms of evaluation to convey emotion were assessed. Five-year-old boys were the most likely to explicitly label anger, while gender and age differences in explicit emotion labels were absent for the other two emotions. However, children used many more linguistic devices for providing evaluation than explicit emotion labels in their narratives. They also provided more with age, and they used more evaluative devices when talking about anger-arousing events than about happy or surprising events. The few gender differences suggested that 3-year-old girls may acquire earlier mastery of evaluative devices than do boys, especially references to emotional states.     

Psychological essentialist reasoning and perspective taking during reading: A donkey is not a zebra,but a plate can be a clock

In an eyetracking study, we examined whether readers use psychological essentialist reasoning and perspective taking online. Stories were presented in which an animal or an artifact was transformed into another animal (e.g., a donkey into a zebra) or artifact (e.g., a plate into a clock). According to psychological essentialism, the essence of the animal did not change in these stories, while the transformed artifact would be thought to have changed categories. We found evidence that readers use this kind of reasoning online: When reference was made to the transformed animal, the nontransformed term (“donkey”) was preferred, but the opposite held for the transformed artifact (“clock” was read faster than “plate”). The immediacy of the effect suggests that this kind of reasoning is employed automatically. Perspective taking was examined within the same stories by the introduction of a novel story character. This character, who was naïve about the transformation, commented on the transformed animal or artifact. If the reader were to take this character’s perspective immediately and exclusively for reference solving, then only the transformed term (“zebra” or “clock”) would be felicitous. However, the results suggested that while this character’s perspective could be taken into account, it seems difficult to completely discard one’s own perspective at the same time.     

Are apes essentialists? Scope and limits of psychological essentialism in great apes

Human reasoning is characterized by psychological essentialism (Gelman in The essential child: origins of essentialism in everyday thought. Oxford University Press, New York, 2003): when reasoning about objects, we distinguish between deep essential properties defining the object’s kind and identity, and merely superficial features that can be changed without altering the object’s identity. To date, it is unclear whether psychological essentialism is based on the acquisition of linguistic means (such as kind terms) and therefore uniquely human, or whether it is a more fundamental cognitive capacity which might be present also in the absence of language. In the present study, we addressed this question by testing whether, and if so, under which circumstances non-human apes also rely on psychological essentialism to identify objects. For this purpose, we adapted classical verbal transformation scenarios used in research on psychological essentialism (Keil in Concepts, kinds, and cognitive development. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1989) and implemented them in two nonverbal tasks: first, a box task, typically used to test object individuation (Experiment 1), and second, an object choice task, typically used to test object discrimination, object preferences and logical inferences (Experiments 2–4). Taken together, the results of the four experiments suggest that under suitable circumstances (when memory and other task demands are minimized), great apes engage in basic forms of essentialist reasoning. Psychological essentialism is thus possible also in the absence of language.     

Conspiracy Formation Is in the Detail: On the Interaction of Conspiratorial Predispositions and Semantic Cues

Significant events are frequently followed by discussions about the event's ‘true nature’. Yet, there is only little evidence whether the conspiratorial reasoning of conspiracy believers and sceptics is a priori determined, or if certain characteristics of information are responsible for provoking a polarization. We investigated how depicted causation (direct vs. indirect; Study 1) and intention (strong vs. weak purposeful; Study 2) might invoke a bias in believers and sceptics regarding conspiratorial reasoning about an ongoing event, namely, whether US investigations against FIFA were more or less likely to be seen as a conspiracy against Russia to sabotage the football World Cup in 2018. We revealed that judgments of conspiracy believers and sceptics about the event's ‘true nature’ are not a priori divided—in fact, conspiracy formation is only affected when direct causation or strong purposeful intentions were obvious. Results point to the relevance of conspiratorial predispositions and semantic cues in conspiracy formation. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.