Department of Psychology, Rutgers University, The State University of New Jersey.
Psychol Rev. 2024 Mar;131(2):373-401. doi: 10.1037/rev0000444. Epub 2023 Aug 17.
Decades of findings in psychology suggest that human belief is thoroughly irrational. At best, beliefs might be formed by heuristic processes that predictably lead to suboptimal outcomes. At worst, they are slaves to motivated reasoning, which allows people to come to whichever conclusions they prefer. In this article, we suggest that belief updating, narrowly construed, may be a rational process that is uniquely sensitive to evidence and cognitively impenetrable to desires or incentives. Before any updating can occur, however, a series of processes mediate between information in the world and subjectively compelling evidence. We distinguish between updating proper and processes of evidence search, acceptance, hypothesis specification, integration of relevant information, and reasoning. We review research highlighting the computational difficulty inherent to each of these problems and conclude that solutions must be heuristic and fallible. Beyond incidental failures, evidence evaluation processes-unlike updating-are penetrable to motivation and as such, may be biased by people's desires and goals. In light of this distinction, we propose a theoretical framework for integrating research on belief which divides the cognitive processes involved in belief into two distinct levels. At Level 1, updating is suggested to be approximately Bayesian and impenetrable to desires and goals. In contrast, Level 2 processes, which search for and evaluate evidence, are cognitively penetrable. In addition, we emphasize that Level 2 processes are necessarily heuristic and exhibit bounded rationality (Simon, 1956) given the difficulty of the problems they have to solve. Finally, we specify an additional set of relatively invariant characteristics, which influence how Level 2 processes are employed by making different methods of information processing available. Our framework offers a more nuanced understanding of belief, permits a granular localization of irrationality, and may help reconcile extant debates in the literature. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
几十年来，心理学的研究结果表明，人类的信念是完全不合理的。在最好的情况下，信念可能是由启发式过程形成的，这些过程可预测地导致次优结果。在最坏的情况下，它们是动机推理的奴隶，动机推理允许人们得出他们喜欢的任何结论。在本文中，我们认为，狭义上的信念更新可能是一个理性的过程，它对证据具有独特的敏感性，并且在认知上不受欲望或激励的影响。然而，在任何更新发生之前，一系列的过程都会在世界上的信息和主观上令人信服的证据之间进行调解。我们区分了正确的更新和证据搜索、接受、假设指定、相关信息整合和推理的过程。我们回顾了强调这些问题中的每一个问题所固有的计算难度的研究，并得出结论，解决方案必须是启发式的和易出错的。除了偶然的失败之外，证据评估过程——与更新不同——易受动机影响，因此可能会受到人们的欲望和目标的偏见。有鉴于此，我们提出了一个整合信念研究的理论框架，该框架将信念所涉及的认知过程分为两个不同的层次。在第一级，更新被建议是近似贝叶斯的，并且不受欲望和目标的影响。相比之下，第二级的过程，即搜索和评估证据的过程，在认知上是可穿透的。此外，我们强调，由于它们必须解决的问题的难度，第二级过程必然是启发式的，并表现出有限理性（西蒙，1956）。最后，我们指定了一组额外的相对不变的特征，这些特征通过提供不同的信息处理方法来影响第二级过程的使用方式。我们的框架提供了对信念的更细致的理解，允许对非理性进行粒度本地化，并可能有助于调和文献中的现存争论。（PsycInfo 数据库记录（c）2024 APA，保留所有权利）。
