New Approaches in Reasoning Research

Wim De Neys, Magda Osman

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134751754
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

Reasoning research has long been associated with paper and pencil tasks in which peoples' reasoning skills are judged against established normative conventions. However, there has been a recent revolution in the range of techniques, empirical methods and paradigms used to examine reasoning behaviour. New Approaches in Reasoning Research brings to the fore these new pioneering research methods and empirical findings.

Each chapter is written by a world-leading expert in the field and covers a variety of broad empirical techniques and new approaches to reasoning research. Maintaining a high level of integrity and rigor throughout, Editors De Neys and Osman have allowed the experts included here the space to think big about the general issues concerning their work, to point out potential implications and speculate on further developments. Such freedom can only help to stimulate discussion and spark creative thinking.

The use of these new methods and paradigms are already generating a new understanding of how we reason, as such this book should appeal to researchers and students of Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology, and Neuroscience along with Cognitive Scientists, and anyone interested in the latest developments in reasoning, rationality, bias, and thinking.

1 New approaches in reasoning research
An introduction

Wim De Neys

Background

As a graduate student who started working in the reasoning field, one of the most frustrating obligations was to present my research to colleagues at the University of Leuven's Experimental Psychology Lab. The lab was huge (the equivalent to a small department in many other universities) and comprised of a large number of research groups that were working on a range of topics from visual perception, to memory and numerical cognition, to reasoning research. Once a year all lab members were expected to present their work to the whole group. These talks were typically quite interesting with a large turnout. They would also usually lead to engaging and stimulating discussions. I write typically and usually because this did not apply to talks by people in the reasoning group. Although our group was internationally renowned in the reasoning community, this was not reflected in the attendance at our talks. Water-cooler conversations¹ taught me that one of the reasons why people were reluctant to show up to talks on reasoning was because they felt it was an insular field of research, perceived at operating in isolation of advances in other fields. Quite a few colleagues also argued that reasoning research was limited in generating innovative methodologies and had really not moved beyond simple paper-and-pencil studies.

When I started attending major international conferences things didn't really improve there either. I was quite struck to discover that reasoning posters and talks tended to attract a very limited and select crowd. Discussions at opening receptions and conference dinners indicated that a lot of scholars in the international cognitive science community shared the views of my Belgian colleagues. In sum, in my experience there seemed to be a quite negative sentiment in the larger cognitive science community towards reasoning research in the late 90s.

Although I could see that there might have been some ground for this negative caricature in past work on reasoning, I also felt that it didn't apply to the work of the many young scholars in the reasoning field that I was getting to know. Indeed, contrary to what the wider community seemed to believe, I was seeing a wide range of new innovative approaches and interdisciplinary research efforts emerging. Although these new trends might not have made it to the mainstream reasoning journals or textbooks yet, the building blocks were definitely there.

At one of those early international conferences that I attended, I was fortunate enough to bump into Magda Osman. Over the years we have spent quite some time discussing the misperception about contemporary reasoning research and the need to showcase the newest approaches both inside and outside the field. Some time ago we decided we probably needed to stop whining and should try to do something about it. The result is the present book.

In a nutshell, our edited volume is designed to bring to the fore trends in research methods and research questions in contemporary reasoning research. As well as re-addressing misperceptions about reasoning research we also hope that the book will stimulate discussion within the reasoning field. Indeed, in addition to informing the wider scientific community about innovative new approaches in the reasoning field, this book should also help to reinvigorate the reasoning field by showing that the use of new methods and paradigms are generating new insights. In the end, we hope that the book will inspire new interest in young researchers inside and outside the reasoning field and boost attention for the study of what has been labeled the essence of our being: reasoning.

Book structure

Each chapter in the book is written by a leading expert and introduces one specific new approach or method. Content-wise our remit for the contributors was twofold:

1 We asked contributors to present their paradigm and briefly review their work for a general audience. The idea here was to arrive at a sort of comprehensive primer that would familiarize the non-expert reader with the approach and methodology.

2 We also wanted to allow authors more freedom than they would typically be given to make bold claims and speculate about the implication of their work. We still aimed to maintain a high level of integrity and rigor in the quality of work from our contributors but we also wanted to give the experts the space to think big about the general issues concerning their work. Bluntly put, we wanted them to have a chance to “speak freely”: even if their research program was still new, we asked them to point out the potential bigger implications and further developments. We felt that such freedom would help to stimulate discussion and spark creative thinking.

Brief chapter overview

I present a very brief overview of the different contributions here. In the final chapter my co-editor, Magda Osman, presents a more in-depth discussion of the chapters and identifies common themes that connect the different approaches.

Chapter 2: Genes of rationality: building blocks for the neurobiology of reasoning (Melanie Stollstorff, University of Colorado Boulder)

Decades of reasoning research have shown that human reasoning is easily biased by erroneous intuitions or so-called heuristics. The work of Melanie Stollstorff concerns a highly contentious issue: the possible genetic basis of individual differences in heuristic bias susceptibility. In her chapter Stollstorff familiarizes the reasoning community with the genetic labeling method and reviews her fascinating findings.

Chapter 3: The rationality of mortals: thoughts of death disrupt analytic processing (Bastien Trémolière and Jean-François Bonnefon, University of Toulouse)

The human species enjoys uniquely developed capacities for analytic reasoning and rational decision-making, but these capacities come with a price: they make us aware of our inevitable physical death. Drawing on terror-management theory and dual-process theories of cognition, Trémolière and Bonnefon discuss the debilitating impact of mortality awareness on analytic reasoning. When made aware of their own death, reasoners allocate their executive resources to the suppression of this disturbing thought, therefore impairing their analytic thinking. Trémolière and Bonnefon discuss a wide range of intriguing consequences for all aspects of rational thinking that draw on executive resources.

Chapter 4: Negative priming in logicomathematical reasoning: the cost of blocking your intuition (Grégoire Borst, Sylvain Moutier and Olivier Houdé, Paris Descartes University and the University of Caen)

Many reasoning theories assume that sound reasoning requires the inhibition of heuristic intuitions that conflict with logical norms. Despite the popularity of this claim, direct memory-based evidence for the postulation of a belief inhibition process is often missing. In their chapter, Grégoire Borst, Sylvain Moutier and Olivier Houdé document how a classic negative priming procedure can be used in reasoning studies to validate the inhibition claim. Their findings show that one ironic consequence of belief inhibition is that previously inhibited intuitive knowledge can remain inaccessible on subsequent trials where the intuitive response could be helpful. The authors discuss the implications of their work for the debate on the nature of heuristic bias.

Chapter 5: Eye-tracking and reasoning: what your eyes tell about your inferences (Linden J. Ball, University of Central Lancashire)

How do our beliefs influence the way we reason? According to Linden J. Ball, one way of investigating this is to examine where people attend and how long they attend to certain information when presented with reasoning tasks. Linden J. Ball and his colleagues pioneered this line of work by using eye trackers. In this chapter, Ball introduces the eye-tracking methodology and illustrates how eye-tracking data can illuminate theories of reasoning. He also considers ways in which the eye-tracking methodology might be deployed in future studies to address questions regarding the optimal explanation of the biases that pervade people's reasoning.

Chapter 6: Self-perception and reasoning: how perceiving yourself as rational makes you less biased (Maria Augustinova, Clermont University)

Social psychologists have shown that the motivation to possess a desired characteristic results in self-perceptions that can have a strong impact on people's behavior. For example, when participants are led to believe that successfully completing a randomly selected task (e.g., solving a puzzle) is characteristic of high self-esteem and leadership potential, they will be more likely to complete it. The innovation by Maria Augustinova and her research team has been to take a paradigm that has been used to explore this behavior in the social cognition domain and apply it to the reasoning field. Her studies show that very basic selfperception manipulations can result in a dramatic decrease in biased responses on classic reasoning tasks. In her chapter Augustinova introduces this work and sketches implications for the reasoning community.

Chapter 7: Probabilistic reasoning: rational expectations in young children and infants (Vittorio Girotto, University IUAV of Venice)

The pioneering work of Vittorio Girotto and his colleagues focuses on the probabilistic reasoning skills of young children and preverbal babies. In his chapter Girotto introduces his approach and reviews his core findings. He clarifies how this work leads to the bold claim that all human beings possess a correct intuition of probability, regardless of their education and background.

Chapter 8: Reasoning research: where was it going? Where is it now? Where will it be going? (Magda Osman, Queen Mary University of London)

In the final chapter Magda Osman starts by putting things in a historical perspective. She considers the origins of reasoning research and the major traditional research themes and issues that emerged. From this, she discusses the new approaches that are presented in this book and tries to identify common themes that connect the different research strands. Against this background she also speculates about the future of reasoning research.

Note

1 This being Belgium, the phrase “conversations-in-a-local-bar-after-a-couple-of-beers” would have probably been more accurate.

2 Genes of rationality
Building blocks for the neurobiology of reasoning

Melanie Stollstorff

Introduction

Genes are the building blocks for life; from infancy to senescence, our genes play a role in making us who we are. Our genetics interact with the environment to make us unique individuals, capable of creative and novel ideas, and at times, “creative logic”. Do our genes predispose us to logical errors? Here I will present some initial evidence that they do. These initial studies might be thought of as the building blocks for the study of reasoning from a neurobiological/genetic perspective.

Generally speaking, healthy adults can reason logically, but tend to make errors in predictable ways (i.e., heuristic biases). Upon learning about human reasoning biases, I'm sure that many individuals think to themselves, “not me!” and can readily provide examples of others whose logic is considerably more error-prone. One classic example of a reasoning heuristic is the belief-bias effect, which is a tendency to solve a reasoning problem based on one's beliefs or prior semantic knowledge rather than logical structure (Evans et al., 1983); that is, to be swayed by beliefs rather than logic. It is known that certain external factors, such as time pressure (Tsujii and Watanabe, 2010) and emotional content (Blanchette and Richards, 2004), increase reasoning bias. Are some people more sensitive to these factors and therefore more prone to logical errors than others? Yes! Internal factors, that is, those arising from within the individual such as working memory and inhibitory control, can influence reasoning bias (Handley et al., 2004). Various cognitive neuroscience methods have begun to shed light on the neurobiology of reasoning over the last 15 years including many types of neuroimaging studies (Goel, 2007; Goel et al., 2000; Luo et al., 2008; Prado et al., 2011; Tsujii and Watanabe, 2009). In this chapter, I will describe findings from a new field of reasoning research: reasoning genetics. Recent research has identified genes to be another internal source of variance that influences deductive reasoning and more specifically, belief bias (Stollstorff et al., 2012). It seems that our genetic make-up influences our ability to reason logically and can account for significant variance in errors which was previously unexplained. This chapter will highlight evidence that reasoning ability is, in part, determined by our genes.

While there is considerable research on cognitive biases in reasoning and some research on the effect of emotion on reasoning (Blanchette and Richards, 2004), little is known about how individual differences in emotional reactivity might enhance or diminish cognitive biases to influence the deductive reasoning process. I will describe a series of studies that investigate the effect of emotional content on bias in logical reasoning and how this behavior and its brain bases are modulated by a polymorphism for the serotonin transporter genotype (SERT) that is known to influence emotional reactivity. I will also explore how dopamine, known to influence cognitive control processes such as working memory and inhibition, can influence the neural bases of biased decision-making. I will conclude by briefly describing other neurobiological factors (neurotransmitters and genes that regulate them) that could help elucidate questions in the field of human reasoning.

Genes, brains and neurotransmitters

Our genetic code programs the building blocks for human thought. The essential neurobiological ingredients for reasoning, such as neurotransmitters, neurons and synapses, arise from our genes. Genes interact with the environment to produce individual differences in many aspects of human thought, feeling and behavior. These differences result, at least in part, from genetic polymorphisms. A genetic polymorphism arises from a mutation that occurred at some point in our evolutionary history that has been preserved and passed on through generations, especially if they promote survival. I will focus primarily on one common genetic polymorphism (the serotonin transporter gene: 5-HTTLPR or “SERT”) and its effect on belief bias in emotional reasoning.

What do genes have to do with reasoning? Genetics provide a natural model to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Current Issues in Thinking and Reasoning
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• 1 New approaches in reasoning research: an introduction
• 2 Genes of rationality: building blocks for the neurobiology of reasoning
• 3 The rationality of mortals: thoughts of death disrupt analytic processing
• 4 Negative priming in logicomathematical reasoning: the cost of blocking your intuition
• 5 Eye-tracking and reasoning: what your eyes tell about your inferences
• 6 Self-perception and reasoning: how perceiving yourself as rational makes you less biased
• 7 Probabilistic reasoning: rational expectations in young children and infants
• 8 Reasoning research: where was it going? Where is it now? Where will it be going?
• Index