Publisher: Wiley Online Library

Publication Date: Jan 1, 2010

Publication Name: Mind & …

In studying how lay people evaluate arguments, psychologists have typically focused on logical form and content. This emphasis has masked an important yet underappreciated aspect of everyday argument evaluation: socia... more abstractIn studying how lay people evaluate arguments, psychologists have typically focused on logical form and content. This emphasis has masked an important yet underappreciated aspect of everyday argument evaluation: social cues to argument strength. Here we focus on the ways in which observers evaluate arguments by the reaction they evoke in an audience. This type of evaluation is likely to occur either when people are not privy to the content of the arguments or when they are not expert enough to appropriately evaluate it. Four experiments explore cues that participants might take into account in evaluating arguments from the reaction of the audience. They demonstrate that participants can use audience motivation, expertise, and size as clues to argument quality. By contrast we find no evidence that participants take audience diversity into account.

Publication Date: 2012

Publication Name: Thinking & Reasoning

Two important parenting strategies are to impose one's power and to use r... more abstractTwo important parenting strategies are to impose one's power and to use reasoning. The effect of these strategies on children's evaluation of testimony has received very little attention. Using the epistemic vigilance framework, we predict that when the reasoning cue is strong enough it should overcome the power cue. We test this prediction in a population for which anthropological data suggest that power is the prominent strategy while reasoning is rarely relied on in the interactions with children. In Experiment 1, 4- to 6-year-old children from a traditional Maya population are shown to endorse the testimony supported by a strong argument over that supported by a weak argument. In Experiment 2, the same participants are shown to follow the testimony of a dominant over that of a subordinate. The participants are then shown to endorse the testimony of a subordinate who provides a strong argument over that of a dominant who provides either a weak argument (Experiment 3) or no argument (Experiment 4). Thus, when the power and reasoning cues conflict, reasoning completely trumps power.

Psychology, Cognitive Science, Linguistics, and Developmental Science

Publication Date: 2015

Publication Name: Developmental Science

Reasoning research suggests that people use more stringent criteria when they evaluate others' arguments than when they produce arguments themselves. To demonstrate this "selective laziness," we used a c... more abstractReasoning research suggests that people use more stringent criteria when they evaluate others' arguments than when they produce arguments themselves. To demonstrate this "selective laziness," we used a choice blindness manipulation. In two experiments, participants had to produce a series of arguments in response to reasoning problems, and they were then asked to evaluate other people's arguments about the same problems. Unknown to the participants, in one of the trials, they were presented with their own argument as if it was someone else's. Among those participants who accepted the manipulation and thus thought they were evaluating someone else's argument, more than half (56% and 58%) rejected the arguments that were in fact their own. Moreover, participants were more likely to reject their own arguments for invalid than for valid answers. This demonstrates that people are more critical of other people's arguments than of their own, without being over...

Psychology and Cognitive Science

Publication Date: Jan 9, 2015

Publication Name: Cognitive science

(Other) people‘s gullibility is a common source of complaint in the political world. Republicans lament that Democrats naively trust the 'liberal media.' Democrats wonder how Republicans can be so credulous as... more abstract(Other) people‘s gullibility is a common source of complaint in the political world. Republicans lament that Democrats naively trust the 'liberal media.' Democrats wonder how Republicans can be so credulous as to believe Fox News. In this kind of attack, gullibility is often equated with lack of sophistication, the subtext is - How can they be so stupid? (Sophisticated is a common antonym of gullible). Indeed, there seems to be a widespread intuition that the best way to influence people is to stop them from thinking. Politicians, newscasters and educators are wont to dumb down their messages; ad men try to distract us so that their slogans will remain unexamined; interrogators try to break suspects‘ ability to reason through continuous questioning or sleep deprivation (or worse). Yet it is possible to argue that this intuition is profoundly misguided and that, overall, the best way to influence people is to tap into their most sophisticated psychological mechanisms, especia...

Habituellement, le raisonnement est conçu comme un mécanisme permettant d'améliorer la qualité de nos connaissances, d'en acquérir de nouvelles, ou de prendre de meilleures décisions. L'objet de cette thès... more abstractHabituellement, le raisonnement est conçu comme un mécanisme permettant d'améliorer la qualité de nos connaissances, d'en acquérir de nouvelles, ou de prendre de meilleures décisions. L'objet de cette thèse est de défendre une autre théorie du raisonnement selon laquelle il a pour fonction d'évaluer des raisons afin de déterminer si elles feront de bons arguments, ou pour juger de la qualité d'un argument qui nous est présenté. En d'autres termes, la fonction du raisonnement est argumentative. Après avoir présenté un argument défendant la plausibilité évolutionniste de cette théorie, des conséquences en sont tirées pour le fonctionnement du raisonnement. Ces prédictions sont ensuite évaluées à l'aune de la littérature en psychologie du raisonnement, psychologie sociale et psychologie de la prise de décision. Le premier argument concerne les performances du raisonnement, qui sont bien supérieures en contexte argumentatif qu'en contexte abstrait. Le rai...

Psychology, Cognitive Science, Cognition, Child Development, Aging, and 7 more

Publication Date: 2012

Cultural Studies