No easy fix for belief bias during syllogistic reasoning?

ABSTRACT

Although erroneous intuitions often lead human thinking astray, recent studies suggest that single-shot interventions in which the underlying problem logic is clarified can easily remediate this bias. Because previous work typically focused on numerical problems, we tested here the generalizability to the infamous non-numerical belief bias during syllogistic reasoning. Unfortunately, results of 3 studies show that the effect is less clear. Although we succeeded in boosting performance for a minority of reasoners, reasoners who remained biased also tended to show a worse performance after training. We conclude that more work is needed to optimise the single-shot “easy fix” intervention approach to remediate belief bias during syllogistic reasoning.

KEYWORDS:

• Reasoning
• heuristics & biases
• de-biasing
• intuition
• syllogistic reasoning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Raw data can be downloaded from our OSF page (https://osf.io/rzm92/).

Notes

1 Since it has been shown that the initial response latency is not a reliable measure for conflict detection (Bago & De Neys, 2017), we will only present the conflict detection associated with the confidence rates.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Idex Université Paris Cité ANR-18-IDEX-0001, France.