The Strategy Behind Belief Revision: A Matter of Judging Probability

30th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society

or the Use of Mental Models? ; Department of Experimental Psychology ; Otto-Behaghel-Straße 10FD-35394 Gießen ; Germany

PID  :  118720

来源: CEUR

【 摘 要 】

Research in the field of human reasoning has shown repeatedlythat people find it reasonably easy to detect inconsistencies. Thequestion that still remains is how people revise their beliefs toundo these inconsistencies. We report two experiments in whichsubjects had to make belief revision choices on modus ponens(MP) and modus tollens (MT) sets of problems that containedconditionals with different levels of probability. After the finalstatement of each set, which was stated to be true, they had todecide which of the first two statements they believed more. Theresults showed that with high and low probability problems,subjects revised their beliefs as a function of the probability of theconditional. However, when the conditional had a near 50%chance of occurring, the pattern of belief revision more resembledthe mismatch principle as suggested by the mental model theory.Thus, people use different strategies when revising their beliefsdepending on whether they are guided by semantics or mentalmodels.