Psychology of Reasoning

The psychology of Bayesian reasoning

Most psychological research on Bayesian reasoning since the 1970s has used a type of problem that tests a certain kind of statistical reasoning performance. The subject is given statistical facts within a hypothetical scenario. Those facts include a base-rate statistic and one or two diagnostic probabilities. The subject is meant to use that information to arrive at a “posterior” probability es...

The psychology of moral reasoning

This article presents a theory of reasoning about moral propositions that is based on four fundamental principles. First, no simple criterion picks out propositions about morality from within the larger set of deontic propositions concerning what is permissible and impermissible in social relations, the law, games, and manners. Second, the mechanisms underlying emotions and deontic evaluations ...

Formal Models of Reasoning in Cognitive Psychology

This special issue offers a broad range of papers showcasing the way cognitive psychologists use formal models to guide their theoretical and experimental investigations of human reasoning. The timing could not be more appropriate, for the psychology of reasoning is at a time when formal models are at the forefront of contemporary research. The psychology of reasoning was long characterized by ...

The Psychology of Causal Perception and Reasoning

Simulative Reasoning, Commonsense Psychology and Artificial Intelligence*

The notion of Simulative Reasoning in the study of propositional attitudes within Artificial Intelligence (AI) is strongly related to the Simulation Theory of mental ascription in Philosophy. Roughly speaking, when an AI system engages in Simulative Reasoning about a target agent, it reasons with that agent’s beliefs as temporary hypotheses of its own, thereby coming to conclusions about what t...