Қорытындының ықтималдығына негізделген аргументтерді бағалау тенденциясы

Tendency to judge the strength of arguments based on the plausibility of their conclusion

Belief bias is the tendency to judge the strength of arguments based on the plausibility of their conclusion rather than how strongly they justify that conclusion. A person is more likely to accept an argument that supports a conclusion that aligns with their values, beliefs and prior knowledge, while rejecting counter arguments to the conclusion. Belief bias is an extremely common and therefore significant form of error; we can easily be blinded by our beliefs and reach the wrong conclusion. Belief bias has been found to influence various reasoning tasks, including conditional reasoning, relation reasoning and transitive reasoning.

Various studies have proved that the time period for which a subject is allowed to think when evaluating arguments is related to the tendency for belief bias to take place. In a study done by Evans and Holmes in 2005, they recruited two different groups of people to answer a series of reasoning questions. One group of people were given only two seconds to answer the questions; whereas the other group of people were allowed to use as much time as they would like to answer the questions. The result obtained was that a higher percentage of incorrect answers were found in the time pressured group than the other; they concluded that this was a result of a shift in logical to belief biased way of thinking.

The nature of the content presented can also affect belief bias of an individual as shown by a study done by Goel & Vartanian in 2011. In their experiment, 34 participants were presented with a syllogism upon each trial. Each trial were either neutral or carried some degree of negative content. Negative content involved in the experiment were politically incorrect social norm violations, such as the statement “Some wars are not unjustified, Some wars involve raping of women, therefore, Some raping of women is not unjustified”. For syllogisms where the content was neutral, the results were consistent with studies of belief bias; however, for syllogisms with negative emotional content, participants were more likely to reason logically on invalid syllogisms with believable conclusions instead of automatically judging them to be valid. In other words, the effect of belief bias is reduced when the content presented is of negative emotion. According to Goel and Vartanian, this is because negative emotions prompts us to reason in more careful and in more detail. This argument was supported by the observation that for questions with negative emotions, the reaction time taken was significantly longer than that of questions that a neutral.

In an experiment done by Evans, Newstead, Allen & Pollard in 1994, where subjects were given detailed instructions which lack specific reference to the notion of logical necessity when answering questions, it was shown that a larger proportion of answers actually rejected invalid arguments with convincing conclusions as opposed to when no further instructions were given when the subjects were asked to answer the questions. The results of the experiments reflects that when elaborated instructions were given to subjects to reason logically, the effects of belief bias is decreased.