Negativity bias in defeasible reasoning

ABSTRACT

In defeasible reasoning, initially drawn conclusions can be withdrawn in light of new information. In this paper, we examine how the conclusions drawn from conditionals describing positive or negative situations can be defeated by subsequent negative or positive information, respectively. Participants were confronted with conditionals of the form “If [situation], then I am happy/sad” which were either followed by no additional information or by additional information describing situations of the same or the opposite valence. The participant's task was to decide on a question asking for a possible conclusion (“Am I happy?” vs. “Am I sad?”). We found a negativity bias in defeasible reasoning: negative information defeated positively charged conclusions more strongly than positive information defeated negatively charged conclusions. We discuss our results in relation to the new psychology of reasoning.

KEYWORDS:

• Conditionals
• defeasible reasoning
• reasoning
• negativity bias

Acknowledgements

We thank Denis Hilton and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Standardised mean differences (d) were computed as described by Borenstein (2009).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by DFG [grant KN 465/10-1 and KN 465/10-2] within the Priority Program “New Frameworks of Rationality” (SPP 1516) to Markus Knauff.