Belief-Bias
...The study conducted replicated Evans (1983) experiment to investigate the
presence of believe-bias in syllogistic reasoning tasks, using an equal number of male
and female participants to avoid gender differences in the results. The findings
showed there was an interaction between believability and logicality, suggesting that
dual-processing theories influenced the results. The Implicit and the Explicit systems
interacted together, where there was a conflict between belief-bias and logicality.
Introduction
Belief bias and confirmation bias are two related phenomena. While belief
bias refers to making a biased evaluation of the evidence that is found, confirmation
bias is a tendency to look for evidence that justifies a prior belief, avoiding conflicting
evidence. There has been a long established connection between belief bias literature
and syllogistic reasoning, where subjects are encouraged to engage in deductive
reasoning, drawing conclusions that follow only from the premises given and
apparently the subjects are not able to distinguish between judgments of validity and
judgments of real world truthful value (Evans & Over, 1996).
Also, there is an idea about human thought that has been around for a long
time, it argues that reasoning is separated into two distinct kinds of cognitive systems
with different evolutionary histories. These systems are referred to as Implicit (system
1) and Explicit (system 2) (Evans & Over, 1996 and Reber, 1993 cited in Evans,
2003), even though some dual-process theorists would rather emphasizing the
functional distinctions between the two systems leaving the relation to consciousness
open (Sloman, 1996 & 2002 cited in Evans, 2003).
Firstly, the Implicit system is explained as a universal form of cognition...
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