Oberauer Klaus, Wilhelm Oliver
Allgemeine Psychologie I, University of Potsdam, Germany.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2003 Jul;29(4):680-93. doi: 10.1037/0278-7393.29.4.680.
Five experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that people understand conditional statements ("if p then q") as indicating a high conditional probability P(q/p). Participants estimated the probability that a given conditional is true (Experiments 1A, 1B, and 3) or judged whether a conditional was true or false (Experiments 2 and 4) given information about the frequencies of the relevant truth table cases. Judgments were strongly influenced by the ratio of pq to p not q cases, supporting the conditional probability account In Experiments 1A, 1B, and 3, judgments were also affected by the frequency of pq cases, consistent with a version of mental model theory. Experiments 3 and 4 extended the results to thematic conditionals and showed that the pragmatic utility associated with believing a statement also affected the degree of belief in conditionals but not in logically equivalent quantified statements.
进行了五项实验来检验一个假设，即人们将条件陈述（“如果p那么q”）理解为表示高条件概率P（q/p）。参与者根据相关真值表情况的频率信息，估计给定条件为真的概率（实验1A、1B和3），或判断一个条件是真还是假（实验2和4）。判断受到pq与p非q情况比例的强烈影响，支持了条件概率理论。在实验1A、1B和3中，判断也受到pq情况频率的影响，这与心智模型理论的一个版本一致。实验3和4将结果扩展到主题条件句，并表明与相信一个陈述相关的语用效用也影响对条件句的相信程度，但不影响对逻辑等价的量化陈述的相信程度。
