Abstract
The Bayesian approach to the psychology of reasoning generalizes binary logic, extending the binary concept of consistency to that of coherence, and allowing the study of deductive reasoning from uncertain premises. Studies in judgment and decision making have found that people’s probability judgments can fail to be coherent. We investigated people’s coherence further for judgments about conjunctions, disjunctions and conditionals, and asked whether their coherence would increase when they were given the explicit task of drawing inferences. Participants gave confidence judgments about a list of separate statements (the statements group) or the statements grouped as explicit inferences (the inferences group). Their responses were generally coherent at above chance levels for all the inferences investigated, regardless of the presence of an explicit inference task. An exception was that they were incoherent in the context known to cause the conjunction fallacy, and remained so even when they were given an explicit inference. The participants were coherent under the assumption that they interpreted the natural language conditional as it is represented in Bayesian accounts of conditional reasoning, but they were incoherent under the assumption that they interpreted the natural language conditional as the material conditional of elementary binary logic. Our results provide further support for the descriptive adequacy of Bayesian reasoning principles in the study of deduction under uncertainty.
Highlights
Most everyday and scientific inferences are from uncertain premises, with the aim of forming and revising beliefs and making decisions
On the assumption that a random response can fall likely on any point of the probability scale, the probability of complying to coherence by chance corresponds to the width of the coherence interval
If a person assigns for instance a probability of 0.6 to the premise of an or-introduction inference, the probability she assigns to the conclusion is coherent if it falls within the interval between 0.6 and 1
Summary
Most everyday and scientific inferences are from uncertain premises, with the aim of forming and revising beliefs and making decisions. Some hypotheses about global warming are more highly confirmed than others, but all are uncertain to some degree, and yet there have to be inferences from these hypotheses to further scientific research and practical decision making. Given the ubiquity of reasoning under uncertainty, an important question in the psychology of reasoning is how good people are at it, and what can improve it when it falls short of the appropriate normative theory. . .the normative theory of judgment under uncertainty has treated the coherence of belief as the touchstone of human rationality.”. To be coherent is to conform to the axioms of probability theory, which are justified by the Dutch book theorem (de Finetti, 1974)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
