Trippas Dries, Thompson Valerie A, Handley Simon J
Center for Adaptive Rationality, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany.
Department of Psychology, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.
Mem Cognit. 2017 May;45(4):539-552. doi: 10.3758/s13421-016-0680-1.
Two experiments pitted the default-interventionist account of belief bias against a parallel-processing model. According to the former, belief bias occurs because a fast, belief-based evaluation of the conclusion pre-empts a working-memory demanding logical analysis. In contrast, according to the latter both belief-based and logic-based responding occur in parallel. Participants were given deductive reasoning problems of variable complexity and instructed to decide whether the conclusion was valid on half the trials or to decide whether the conclusion was believable on the other half. When belief and logic conflict, the default-interventionist view predicts that it should take less time to respond on the basis of belief than logic, and that the believability of a conclusion should interfere with judgments of validity, but not the reverse. The parallel-processing view predicts that beliefs should interfere with logic judgments only if the processing required to evaluate the logical structure exceeds that required to evaluate the knowledge necessary to make a belief-based judgment, and vice versa otherwise. Consistent with this latter view, for the simplest reasoning problems (modus ponens), judgments of belief resulted in lower accuracy than judgments of validity, and believability interfered more with judgments of validity than the converse. For problems of moderate complexity (modus tollens and single-model syllogisms), the interference was symmetrical, in that validity interfered with belief judgments to the same degree that believability interfered with validity judgments. For the most complex (three-term multiple-model syllogisms), conclusion believability interfered more with judgments of validity than vice versa, in spite of the significant interference from conclusion validity on judgments of belief.
两项实验将信念偏差的默认干预主义解释与并行处理模型进行了对比。根据前者的观点，信念偏差的出现是因为对结论进行基于信念的快速评估抢先于需要工作记忆的逻辑分析。相比之下，根据后者的观点，基于信念和基于逻辑的反应是并行发生的。研究人员给参与者提供了不同复杂度的演绎推理问题，并指示他们在一半的试验中判断结论是否有效，在另一半试验中判断结论是否可信。当信念和逻辑发生冲突时，默认干预主义观点预测，基于信念做出反应的时间应该比基于逻辑的反应时间短，并且结论的可信度应该会干扰有效性判断，但反之则不然。并行处理观点预测，只有在评估逻辑结构所需的处理超过评估基于信念判断所需的知识所需的处理时，信念才会干扰逻辑判断，反之亦然。与后一种观点一致，对于最简单的推理问题（肯定前件式），信念判断的准确性低于有效性判断，并且可信度对有效性判断的干扰比对相反情况的干扰更大。对于中等复杂度的问题（否定后件式和单模型三段论），干扰是对称的，即有效性对信念判断的干扰程度与可信度对有效性判断的干扰程度相同。对于最复杂的问题（三项多模型三段论），结论可信度对有效性判断的干扰比对相反情况的干扰更大，尽管结论有效性对信念判断也有显著干扰。
