Broadening the study of inductive reasoning: Confirmation judgments with uncertain evidence

Mastropasqua, Tommaso; Crupi, Vincenzo; Tentori, Katya

doi:10.3758/mc.38.7.941

Cited by 16 publications

(43 citation statements)

References 47 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…8 (For a validation of this kind of procedure as effectively eliciting confirmation rather than posterior probability judgments, see Mastropasqua et al, 2010, andTentori et al, 2007. ) Finally, the conjunction fallacy task was meant to detect, for each of the two scenarios, the occurrence of conjunction fallacy responses and their distribution between h 1 ∧h 2 versus h 1 ∧not-h 2 .…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the determinants of the conjunction fallacy: Probability versus inductive confirmation.

Tentori¹,

Crupi²,

Russo³

2013

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

Self Cite

132

177

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Major recent interpretations of the conjunction fallacy postulate that people assess the probability of a conjunction according to (non-normative) averaging rules as applied to the constituents' probabilities or represent the conjunction fallacy as an effect of random error in the judgment process. In the present contribution, we contrast such accounts with a different reading of the phenomenon based on the notion of inductive confirmation as defined by contemporary Bayesian theorists. Averaging rule hypotheses along with the random error model and many other existing proposals are shown to all imply that conjunction fallacy rates would rise as the perceived probability of the added conjunct does. By contrast, our account predicts that the conjunction fallacy depends on the added conjunct being perceived as inductively confirmed. Four studies are reported in which the judged probability versus confirmation of the added conjunct have been systematically manipulated and dissociated. The results consistently favor a confirmation-theoretic account of the conjunction fallacy against competing views. Our proposal is also discussed in connection with related issues in the study of human inductive reasoning.

show abstract

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the determinants of the conjunction fallacy: Probability versus inductive confirmation.

Tentori¹,

Crupi²,

Russo³

2013

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

Self Cite

132

177

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…People turn out to be better at judging confirmation than posterior probabilities (e.g. Mastropasqua et al 2010, Tentori et al 2016. In investigating people's conditional probability judgments, it has been found that subjects don't strictly conform to the rigidity requirement, which prescribes that conditional credences should be stable (Zhao & Osherson 2010).…”

Section: The Puzzlementioning

confidence: 99%

How do Beliefs Simplify Reasoning?

Staffel

2018

Nous

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

According to an increasingly popular epistemological view, people need outright beliefs in addition to credences to simplify their reasoning. Outright beliefs simplify reasoning by allowing thinkers to ignore small error probabilities. What is outright believed can change between contexts. It has been claimed that thinkers manage shifts in their outright beliefs and credences across contexts by an updating procedure resembling conditionalization, which I call pseudo‐conditionalization (PC). But conditionalization is notoriously complicated. The claim that thinkers manage their beliefs via PC is thus in tension with the view that the function of beliefs is to simplify our reasoning. I propose to resolve this puzzle by rejecting the view that thinkers employ PC. Based on this solution, I furthermore argue for a descriptive and a normative claim. The descriptive claim is that the available strategies for managing beliefs and credences across contexts that are compatible with the simplifying function of outright beliefs can generate synchronic and diachronic incoherence in a thinker's attitudes. Moreover, I argue that the view of outright belief as a simplifying heuristic is incompatible with the view that there are ideal norms of coherence or consistency governing outright beliefs that are too complicated for human thinkers to comply with.

show abstract

“…In spite of their popularity in epistemology, Bayesian models of impact are rarely studied in psychological research. When they are, however, participants consistently have proved accurate in estimating evidential impact, both with categorical (Lo et al, 2002) and non-categorical arguments concerning artificial material (e.g., urns and balls of different colors, Tentori, Crupi, Bonini, et al, 2007) as well as with real-world predicates (e.g., "to be a male," "to own a motorbike worth 10,000 Euros," Mastropasqua, Crupi, & Tentori, 2010). Accurate impact judgments were also obtained when the uncertainty of evidence was manipulated, either explicitly (directly providing numerical information concerning the probability of the evidence) or implicitly (employing ambiguous pictures as evidence).…”

Section: The Assessment Of Evidential Impactmentioning

confidence: 99%

Judging the Probability of Hypotheses Versus the Impact of Evidence: Which Form of Inductive Inference Is More Accurate and Time‐Consistent?

2015

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Inductive reasoning requires exploiting links between evidence and hypotheses. This can be done focusing either on the posterior probability of the hypothesis when updated on the new evidence or on the impact of the new evidence on the credibility of the hypothesis. But are these two cognitive representations equally reliable? This study investigates this question by comparing probability and impact judgments on the same experimental materials. The results indicate that impact judgments are more consistent in time and more accurate than probability judgments. Impact judgments also predict the direction of errors in probability judgments. These findings suggest that human inductive reasoning relies more on estimating evidential impact than on posterior probability.

show abstract

Broadening the study of inductive reasoning: Confirmation judgments with uncertain evidence

Cited by 16 publications

References 47 publications

On the determinants of the conjunction fallacy: Probability versus inductive confirmation.

On the determinants of the conjunction fallacy: Probability versus inductive confirmation.

How do Beliefs Simplify Reasoning?

Judging the Probability of Hypotheses Versus the Impact of Evidence: Which Form of Inductive Inference Is More Accurate and Time‐Consistent?

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About