The effects of graduate training on reasoning: Formal discipline and thinking about everyday-life events.

Abstract

The theory of formal disciplinenthat is, the view that instruction in abstract rule systems can affect reasoning about everyday-life eventsnhas been rejected by 20th century psychologists on the basis of rather scant evidence. We examined the effects of graduate training in law, medicine, psychology, and chemistry on statistical reasoning, methodological reasoning about confounded variables, and reasoning about problems in the logic of the conditional Both psychology and medical training produced large effects on statistical and methodological reasoning, and psychology, medical, and law training pro- duced effects on ability to reason about problems in the logic of the conditional Chemistry training had no effect on any type of reasoning studied. These results seem well understood in terms of the rule systems taught by the various fields and indicate that a version of the formal discipline hypothesis is correct.