Informal Reasoning: Theory and Method.

Presents an overview of this special issue and provides some implications for theory and conclusions. The great majority of the everyday reasoning, including that of expert groups engaged in their professions, is informal. By contrast, most of the studies of human inference reported by psychologists in the literature are of formal reasoning. This discrepancy provides considerable cause for concern and not only because cognitive psychology should have some practical application. Excessive focus on formal reasoning tasks has also, in our view, inhibited the development of good theories of human reasoning. What Is Informal Reasoning, and Why Do We Need to Study It? Psychological studies of formal reasoning have fallen largely into two domains: deductive reasoning and statistical inference. These two endeavours have much in common and some researchers work in both areas. In both cases, participants are presented with what problem-solving researchers call well-defined problems. A well-defined problem can be solved by use of the information provided and no other; in fact, the correct solution to these problems often requires the reasoner to use only the information provided in the premises, and to avoid adding background information and knowledge to the problem domain. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The impact of print exposure quality and inference construction on syllogistic reasoning.

This study extended the work of S. Siddiqui, R. F. West, and K. E. Stanovich (1998), who studied the link between general print exposure and syllogistic reasoning. It was hypothesized that exposure to certain text structures that contain well-delineated logical forms, such as popularized scientific texts, would be a better predictor of deductive reasoning skill than general print exposure, which is not sensitive to the quality of an individual's reading activity. Furthermore, it was predicted that the ability to generate explanatory bridging inferences while reading would also be predictive of syllogistic reasoning. Undergraduate students (N = 112) were tested for vocabulary, nonverbal cognitive ability, exposure to general print, exposure to popularized scientific literature, and the ability to comprehend texts distinguished by the number of inferences that must be generated to support comprehension. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses showed that a combined measure of exposure to general and scientific literature was a significant predictor of syllogistic reasoning ability. Additionally, the ability to comprehend high-inference-load texts was related to solving syllogisms that were inconsistent with world knowledge, indicating an overlap in deductive reasoning skill and text comprehension processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Conditional reasoning in children.

Conditional reasoning ability is analyzed in the context of Piaget's logical operational system. It is argued that facility in concrete operations is necessary and sufficient for competence in the simple syllogistic forms, though dealing with conditional statements in certain more complex contexts requires formal operations. Data from 3 studies are presented in support of these assertions. Using a total of 120 Ss in Grades 1–5, results of Exps I and II show that presentation of statements in a concrete conversational context elicited substantially more correct conditional reasoning than has been found in earlier studies. Results of Exp III, which used a total of 154 Ss in Grades 2, 4, 6, and 8, indicate that a distinction is drawn between comprehension that p (not p) entails the possibility of q (given If p, then q) and comprehension that q entails the possibility of p. The former is less difficult than the latter, and only the latter requires concrete operations. A methodological implication of these studies is that in the assessment of logical competence, results depend heavily on the exact manner of presentation, as well as on the specific logical operation being assessed. Implications for the theory of formal operations and for the study of traditional syllogistic reasoning are also discussed. (19 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Learning from text with diagrams: Promoting mental model development and inference generation.

Two experiments investigated learning outcomes and comprehension processes when students learned about the heart and circulatory system using (a) text only, (b) text with simplified diagrams designed to highlight important structural relations, or (c) text with more detailed diagrams reflecting a more accurate representation. Experiment 1 found that both types of diagrams supported mental model development, but simplified diagrams best supported factual learning. Experiment 2 replicated learning effects from Experiment 1 and tested the influence of diagrams on novices' comprehension processes. Protocol analyses indicated that both types of diagrams supported inference generation and reduced comprehension errors, but simplified diagrams most strongly supported information integration during learning. Visual representations appear to be most effective when they are designed to support the cognitive processes necessary for deep comprehension. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Automatic and controlled components of judgment and decision making.

The categorization of inductive reasoning into largely automatic processes (heuristic reasoning) and controlled analytical processes (rule-based reasoning) put forward by dual-process approaches of judgment under uncertainty (e.g., K. E. Stanovich & R. F. West, 2000) has been primarily a matter of assumption with a scarcity of direct empirical findings supporting it. The present authors use the process dissociation procedure (L. L. Jacoby, 1991) to provide convergent evidence validating a dual-process perspective to judgment under uncertainty based on the independent contributions of heuristic and rule-based reasoning. Process dissociations based on experimental manipulation of variables were derived from the most relevant theoretical properties typically used to contrast the two forms of reasoning. These include processing goals (Experiment 1), cognitive resources (Experiment 2), priming (Experiment 3), and formal training (Experiment 4); the results consistently support the author's perspective. They conclude that judgment under uncertainty is neither an automatic nor a controlled process but that it reflects both processes, with each making independent contributions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Hemispheric contributions to nonverbal abstract reasoning and problem solving.

Hemispheric involvement in reasoning abilities has been debated for some time, and it remains unclear whether the right hemisphere's involvement in problem solving is modality specific or dependent on the type of spatial reasoning required. In the current study, 2 types of nonverbal reasoning abilities were examined, spatial reasoning and proportional reasoning, in 109 patients with cerebrovascular disease that was confined to either the right or the left hemisphere or was diffuse in nature. Results indicated that no lateralizing effects were present based on type of spatial reasoning. Findings are consistent with the suggestion that higher order cognitive processes involved in nonverbal abstraction and problem solving are not strongly lateralized to the right hemisphere but rather are more generally distributed throughout the cortex. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Two moralities in action contexts: Relationships to thought, ego regulation, and development.

Six adolescent friendship groups (56 Ss aged 13–27 yrs), each group being sexually heterogeneous but all Black or White and all of lower or middle socioeconomic status, participated in moral games in an investigation of moral action constructed according to 2 different formulations. L. Kohlberg's (1969) theory of formal moral judgment, which is viewed as a process of deducing logical moral solutions from imperative rules, was contrasted with an interpersonal formulation that posits that moral solutions are achieved through dialogues that strive for balanced agreements among participants. Analyses focused on relationships between interview-based moral thought, action in the moral games, the coordination of action by coping and defensive processes used in these moral games, and changes in the level of thought after the game experiences. Although the levels of both the Kohlberg and interpersonal scores fluctuated between games, the interpersonal scores were more stable than the formal scores, particularly in stressful games. Black adolescents had higher interpersonal than formal levels; Whites reversed this pattern. All Ss used interpersonal more frequently than formal reasoning in the action situations. Predictions of action from test levels were markedly improved for the interpersonal moral scores when ego processing was taken into account. After the games the levels of both moral scores increased for the 6 experimental groups as compared to a control group of an additional 17 teenagers. (21 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Accessing Distant Premise Information: How Memory Feeds Reasoning.

According to current psychological models of deduction, people can draw inferences on the basis of information that they receive from different sources at different times. In 3 reading-comprehension experiments, the authors demonstrated that premises that appear far apart in a text (distant) are not accessed and are therefore not used as a basis for logical inferences (Experiment 1), unless the premises are reinstated by a contextual cue (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, the authors investigated whether these deductions are then integrated into the reader's situation model of the text. The results are interpreted in terms of a collaboration between memory-based text processing and higher level schema-driven logical reasoning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Bias in adolescents' everyday reasoning and its relationship with intellectual ability, personal theories, and self-serving motivation.

The author presented 60 9th and 12th graders with hypothetical arguments that contained logical fallacies. Arguments were either consistent or inconsistent with participants' theories. Participants rated the quality and truth of each argument, identified perceived strengths and weaknesses in the arguments, and verbally described hypothetical experiments that could lead to evidence falsifying the claims made in the arguments. Results indicated that intellectual ability, particularly verbal ability, was the best predictor of each index of everyday reasoning. However, neither the ability measures nor age were related to biases in everyday reasoning. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses showed that, for each reasoning variable, adolescents' personal theories accounted for the most variance in reasoning biases. These findings are discussed in terms of the roles that intellectual ability and theory-driven motivation play in everyday reasoning and self-serving adolescent reasoning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Logic and human reasoning: An assessment of the deduction paradigm.

The study of deductive reasoning has been a major paradigm in psychology for approximately the past 40 years. Research has shown that people make many logical errors on such tasks and are strongly influenced by problem content and context. It is argued that this paradigm was developed in a context of logicist thinking that is now outmoded. Few reasoning researchers still believe that logic is an appropriate normative system for most human reasoning, let alone a model for describing the process of human reasoning, and many use the paradigm principally to study pragmatic and probabilistic processes. It is suggested that the methods used for studying reasoning be reviewed, especially the instructional context, which necessarily defines pragmatic influences as biases. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Story understanding and counterfactual reasoning.

D. Kahneman and A. Tversky (1982), in a seminal study on counterfactual reasoning, claimed empirical support for a simulation heuristic wherein ease of converting unusual conditions determines their selection as causes over normal conditions. Discourse analysis of their stories revealed a confounding of explanation and normality. A connectionist simulation of online comprehension and memory access of alternative conditions without conversion accounted for their data. Normality and explanation were varied independently in 2 experiments. Explanation but not normality affected the rank ordering of counterfactual conditions after reading. Access of alternative conditions in simulation was again the best predictor of empirical findings. Comprehension and memory operate where stories communicate information for decision making such as counterfactual reasoning and hindsight bias. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Thinking graphically: Connecting vision and cognition during graph comprehension.

Task analytic theories of graph comprehension account for the perceptual and conceptual processes required to extract specific information from graphs. Comparatively, the processes underlying information integration have received less attention. We propose a new framework for information integration that highlights visual integration and cognitive integration. During visual integration, pattern recognition processes are used to form visual clusters of information; these visual clusters are then used to reason about the graph during cognitive integration. In 3 experiments, the processes required to extract specific information and to integrate information were examined by collecting verbal protocol and eye movement data. Results supported the task analytic theories for specific information extraction and the processes of visual and cognitive integration for integrative questions. Further, the integrative processes scaled up as graph complexity increased, highlighting the importance of these processes for integration in more complex graphs. Finally, based on this framework, design principles to improve both visual and cognitive integration are described. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Conditional reasoning, representation, and level of abstraction.

This study examined the idea that (1) reasoning involves construction of mental representations (models) of premises and that (2) there is a developmental progression in the ability of Ss to reason with models containing concrete and abstract elements. Exp 1 found that for 13- and 16-yr-old Ss, reasoning with abstract content was more difficult than with concrete content. Younger Ss appeared to rely more on concrete representations that used real-world knowledge than on more general abstract representations. Exp 2 explored order effects in the presentation of concrete and abstract problems. Abstract followed by concrete problems led to reduced concrete-problem performance for high school students but did not affect performance for university students. These results support the hypotheses and suggest that development of formal reasoning abilities goes through 2 levels. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment.

Research on moral judgment has been dominated by rationalist models, in which moral judgment is thought to be caused by moral reasoning. The author gives 4 reasons for considering the hypothesis that moral reasoning does not cause moral judgment; rather, moral reasoning is usually a post hoc construction, generated after a judgment has been reached. The social intuitionist model is presented as an alternative to rationalist models. The model is a social model in that it deemphasizes the private reasoning done by individuals and emphasizes instead the importance of social and cultural influences. The model is an intuitionist model in that it states that moral judgment is generally the result of quick, automatic evaluations (intuitions). The model is more consistent than rationalist models with recent findings in social, cultural, evolutionary, and biological psychology, as well as in anthropology and primatology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Modeling the effects of argument length and validity on inductive and deductive reasoning.

In an effort to assess models of inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning, the authors, in 3 experiments, examined the effects of argument length and logical validity on evaluation of arguments. In Experiments 1a and 1b, participants were given either induction or deduction instructions for a common set of stimuli. Two distinct effects were observed: Induction judgments were more affected by argument length, and deduction judgments were more affected by validity. In Experiment 2, fluency was manipulated by displaying the materials in a low-contrast font, leading to increased sensitivity to logical validity. Several variants of 1-process and 2-process models of reasoning were assessed against the results. A 1-process model that assumed the same scale of argument strength underlies induction and deduction was not successful. A 2-process model that assumed separate, continuous informational dimensions of apparent deductive validity and associative strength gave the more successful account. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Relations between inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning.

One of the most important open questions in reasoning research is how inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning are related. In an effort to address this question, we applied methods and concepts from memory research. We used 2 experiments to examine the effects of logical validity and premise–conclusion similarity on evaluation of arguments. Experiment 1 showed 2 dissociations: For a common set of arguments, deduction judgments were more affected by validity, and induction judgments were more affected by similarity. Moreover, Experiment 2 showed that fast deduction judgments were like induction judgments—in terms of being more influenced by similarity and less influenced by validity, compared with slow deduction judgments. These novel results pose challenges for a 1-process account of reasoning and are interpreted in terms of a 2-process account of reasoning, which was implemented as a multidimensional signal detection model and applied to receiver operating characteristic data. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Stephen J. Ceci: Award for Distinguished Scientific Applications of Psychology.

Provides the biography of Stephen J. Ceci and announces that he has won the Award for Distinguished Scientific Applications of Psychology for his seamless integration of basic and applied research in a most influential program of work on intelligence, reasoning, memory, and suggestibility in everyday contexts. A selected bibliography is also provided. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Predicting intermediate and multiple conclusions in propositional logic inference problems: Further evidence for a mental logic.

This article examines whether a particular mental logic introduced by M. D. S. Braine, B. J. Reiser, and B. Rumain (1984) is a reasonably accurate model of people's logical routines for propositional reasoning. Participants are presented with reasoning problems; to make their reasoning steps explicit, they write down, in order, everything they infer. The inferences predicted by the model are compared with participants' output. Three quarters of participants' responses were predicted, and 85%–90% of the time the output of the model's core inference rules was written down. To predict equally well, L. J. Rips's (1994) mental logic model would need to adopt some of our model's features. The data indicate several problems in the mental models theory and cannot be explained by pragmatic reasoning schemas. Arguments against a mental logic are questioned. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On the relation between representations constructed from text comprehension and transitive inference production.

Deductive inference production from texts is a process considered to involve either the construction of an integrated mental model or the step-by-step coordination of propositional representations of the sentences. These alternative hypotheses were tested in 3 experiments using a set inclusion task paradigm in which participants had to recall the premises and to evaluate transitive inferences. Contrary to what is known about linear ordering relations, order of recalls and reaction times provide evidence that the encoding of set inclusion relations does not result in an integrated representation. These results suggest that the mental models theory needs to take account of the nature of the relation to be represented if it is to become a general theory of reasoning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)