A reasoner’s beliefs can compromise or inflate the accuracy of their syllogistic judgments when syllogistic content and structure are incongruent or congruent, respectively. An integrated approach to the study of syllogistic reasoning led to the investigation of premise-based belief-content conflict and its impact on belief bias. The belief-content conflict cue attenuated belief bias in incongruent valid and invalid trials, as well as congruent invalid trials. Its efficacy was found to depend on the difficulty level of the syllogism in which it was embedded and the location of its placement. Reaction time analyses were used to guide interpretations about the relative engagement of Systems 1 and 2. The key findings suggested that belief-content conflict activated System 2 for invalid incongruent trials which would otherwise have been processed using low-cost heuristic means due to their inherent difficulty. In contrast, it appeared that in valid trials the cue led to a redirection of System 2 resources such that specialized analytic strategies were applied in incongruent trials preceded by belief-content conflict compared to those lacking this cue. Finally, belief bias was successfully offset by belief-content conflict even in cases of congruency. In congruent invalid trials without this cue participants’ intuitive awareness of the content-structure match appeared to lead to low-cost, belief-based guesses; yet when presented as the major premise this conflict cue appeared to shift System 1 processing away from content and towards structure. Albeit less diligent than System 2 analysis, the shallow consideration of structural features may have been viewed as a safer bet than any shortcut aiming to capitalize on syllogistic content. This set of findings cannot be fully accounted for by the selective scrutiny, misinterpreted necessity, mental models, verbal reasoning, selective processing, or Receiver Operating Characteristics accounts thereby highlighting the need for considering belief-content conflict in future models of belief bias.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/65668 |
| Date | 21 July 2014 |
| Creators | Hilscher, Michelle |
| Contributors | Cupchik, Gerald |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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