Reber Rolf, Unkelbach Christian
Rev Philos Psychol. 2010 Dec;1(4):563-581. doi: 10.1007/s13164-010-0039-7. Epub 2010 Sep 7.
This article combines findings from cognitive psychology on the role of processing fluency in truth judgments with epistemological theory on justification of belief. We first review evidence that repeated exposure to a statement increases the subjective ease with which that statement is processed. This increased processing fluency, in turn, increases the probability that the statement is judged to be true. The basic question discussed here is whether the use of processing fluency as a cue to truth is epistemically justified. In the present analysis, based on Bayes' Theorem, we adopt the reliable-process account of justification presented by Goldman (1986) and show that fluency is a reliable cue to truth, under the assumption that the majority of statements one has been exposed to are true. In the final section, we broaden the scope of this analysis and discuss how processing fluency as a potentially universal cue to judged truth may contribute to cultural differences in commonsense beliefs.
本文将认知心理学中关于加工流畅性在真值判断中的作用的研究结果与认识论中关于信念确证的理论结合起来。我们首先回顾证据，即反复接触一个陈述会增加处理该陈述的主观轻松程度。这种增加的加工流畅性反过来又增加了该陈述被判断为真的可能性。这里讨论的基本问题是，将加工流畅性用作真值线索在认识论上是否合理。在当前基于贝叶斯定理的分析中，我们采用了戈德曼（1986）提出的确证的可靠过程解释，并表明在一个人接触到的大多数陈述为真的假设下，流畅性是真值的可靠线索。在最后一节中，我们拓宽了这一分析的范围，并讨论了作为判断真值的潜在普遍线索的加工流畅性如何可能导致常识信念中的文化差异。
