Research on people’s confidence in their general knowledge has to date produced two fairly stable effects, many inconsistent results, and no comprehensive theory. We propose such a comprehensive framework, the theory of probabilistic mental models (PMM theory). The theory (a) explains both the overconfidence effect (mean confidence is higher than percentage of answers correct) and the hard-easy...

This paper explores the introduction of groupware into an organization to understand the changes in work practices and social interaction facilitated by the technology. The results suggest that people's mental models and organizations' structure and culture significantly influence how groupware is implemented and used. Specifically, in the absence of mental models that stressed its collaborativ...

We report two studies investigating how naïve reasoners evaluate the probability that a conditional assertion is true, and the conditional probability that the consequent of the conditional is true given that the antecedent is true. The mental model theory predicts that individuals should evaluate the probability of a conditional on the basis of the mental models representing the conditional, a...

Fiction can be a means of striving towards truths, but in a way that is more abstract than the truths of everyday happenings. We offer a staircase of evolutionary pre-adaptations on which works of literature such as novels and plays depend. These include systems of mirror-neurons, mimetic ritual, conversational language based on actions, narrative structure, metaphor, and imaginary play. These ...

A common view in epistemology is that some beliefs are more entrenched than others. This view is plausible, but we show that it fails to explain which statements individuals tend to doubt when an incontrovertible fact is inconsistent with the relevant set of statements. We report three studies that each show that the believability of statements is influenced by context. Given a conditional of t...

In this paper, we introduce some mathematical features of the concentration factor, a method to extract the information of the conditions of student mental models by analyzing the distributions of students’ responses on multiple-choice questions. We discuss the state density of the concentration factor, the random attractor of SC states, and the transformations between the concentration factor ...

Two experiments examined how the mental models of premises influence deductive reasoning. Experiment 1 showed that individuals draw different conclusions from the same information depending on whether it is expressed in conditional assertions or disjunctions. It also showed that co-reference within the premises can speed up more difficult inferences. Experiment 2 corroborated these results and ...

Successful social interactions depend on people's ability to predict others' future actions and emotions. People possess many mechanisms for perceiving others' current emotional states, but how might they use this information to predict others' future states? We hypothesized that people might capitalize on an overlooked aspect of affective experience: current emotions predict future emotions. B...