How to get rid of the belief bias: Boosting analytical thinking via pragmatics

The finding, in one line

“The previous research attempts to reduce the influence of the belief bias on deductive thinking have often been unsuccessful and, when they succeeded, they failed to replicate.”

Abstract

The previous research attempts to reduce the influence of the belief bias on deductive thinking have often been unsuccessful and, when they succeeded, they failed to replicate. In this paper, we propose a new way to see an old problem. Instead of considering the analytical abilities of the respondent, we focus on the communicative characteristics of the experimental task. By changing the pragmatics into play through a subtle manipulation of the instruction of the syllogism problem, we obtained a strong improvement in the accuracy of the performance in both untrained and trained in logic respon

Abstract by Laura Macchi; Francesco Poli; Laura Caravona; Michela Vezzoli; Miriam Franchella; Maria Bagassi, Europe’s Journal of Psychology (2019) — licensed CC BY 4.0.

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