Pragmatic reasoning schemas

Abstract

We propose that people typically reason about realistic situations using neither content-free syntactic inference rules nor representations of specific experiences. Rather, people reason using knowledge structures that we term pragmatic reasoning schemas, which are generalized sets of rules defined in relation to classes of goals. Three experiments examined the impact of a "permission schema" on deductive reasoning. Experiment 1 demonstrated that by evoking the permission schema it is possible to facilitate performance in Wason's selection paradigm for subjects who have had no experience with the specific content of the problems. Experiment 2 showed that a selection problem worded in terms of an abstract permission elicited better performance than one worded in terms of a concrete but arbitrary situation, providing evidence for an abstract permission schema that is free of domain-specific content. Experiment 3 provided evidence that evocation of a permission schema affects not only tasks requiring procedural knowledge, but also a linguistic rephrasing task requiring declarative knowledge. In particular, statements in the form ifp then q were rephrased into the form p on/y ifq with greater frequency for permission than for arbitrary statements, and rephrasings of permission statements produced a pattern of introduction of modals (must, can) totally unlike that observed for arbitrary conditional statements. Other pragmatic schemas, such as "causal" and "evidence" schemas can account for both linguistic and reasoning phenomena that alternative hypotheses fail to explain. 0 1985 Academic Prcrs, Inc. Reasoning fallacies are apparent in discourse and behavior. Their causes, however, have been as mysterious and elusive as the fallacies This research was supported by grants from the Spencer Foundation and the National Science Foundation (BNS-8409198). K. Holyoak was supported by an NIMH Research Scientist Development Award, 5K02-MHOO342-04. We thank Richard Nisbett for his important intellectual contributions to the project. We also thank Robert Pachella, Donna Ratte, and Mary Trahan for conducting Experiment 2 in their classes. Lindsay Oliver, Y. Y. Chan, and Eric Ho assisted with data and statistical analyses. Reprint requests may be sent to

Selective impairment of reasoning about social exchange in a patient with bilateral limbic system damage

“…1.) This spike in performance when the conditional is a social contract has been found widely in industrialized nations (8)(9)(10)(11)17) and, in the accompanying paper, recently has been observed even among isolated, nonliterate hunter-horticulturalists (18). Cognitive experiments have demonstrated that the activation of this heightened performance is sensitively regulated by the series of variables expected if this were a system whose function were to reason specifically about social exchange, rather than about a broader class of contents (8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13)18).…”

“…All of the social contracts and precautions were permission rules [as defined by pragmatic reasoning theory (17,25)] and therefore logically (and deontically) equivalent. The average length of the social contract problems was 153.7 words, and that of the precaution problems was 154.0 words; thus they were well matched for verbal complexity and memory load.…”

“…While some propose that there is a separate cognitive specialization for reasoning about hazards parallel to a social contract specialization (12,13), most theories of reasoning propose that cheater detection and precautionary reasoning are both accomplished by more general-purpose mechanisms that are designed to operate on a single, more inclusive, class of content: either any conditional rule (26)(27)(28), any rule with certain pragmatic implications (29), any deontic rule-i.e., any rule expressing permission, obligation, or entitlement (17,25,30), or any deontic rule involving utilities (26).…”

Extrapolation and structural similarity in games

“…5 Participants were informed that they were matched with the same group of participants as in the first phase and that they would be randomly rematched with other participants in each of the periods of the second phase. This was done in 4 Psychologists have studied how different isomorphic representations of the same problem or tasks can induce different solution strategies and behavioural outcomes. This is often referred to as the "representation effect", which is closely related to "framing effects" more well known among economists (Tversky and Kahneman 1981; Chen and Holyoak, 1985; Novick 1990; Zhang and Norman 1999).…”

“…Rapoport et al (2000), Cooper andKagel (2003, 2008) 4 The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we describe the experimental design.…”