Cognitive Science 37 (1):193-209 (2013)
Abstract |
The psychology of reasoning is increasingly considering agents' values and preferences, achieving greater integration with judgment and decision making, social cognition, and moral reasoning. Some of this research investigates utility conditionals, ‘‘if p then q’’ statements where the realization of p or q or both is valued by some agents. Various approaches to utility conditionals share the assumption that reasoners make inferences from utility conditionals based on the comparison between the utility of p and the expected utility of q. This article introduces a new parameter in this analysis, the underlying causal structure of the conditional. Four experiments showed that causal structure moderated utility-informed conditional reasoning. These inferences were strongly invited when the underlying structure of the conditional was causal, and significantly less so when the underlying structure of the conditional was diagnostic. This asymmetry was only observed for conditionals in which the utility of q was clear, and disappeared when the utility of q was unclear. Thus, an adequate account of utility-informed inferences conditional reasoning requires three components: utility, probability, and causal structure
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Keywords | Utility Reasoning Diagnostic Conditional Cause |
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DOI | 10.1111/cogs.12014 |
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References found in this work BETA
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Citations of this work BETA
Is the Basic Conditional Probabilistic?Geoffrey P. Goodwin - 2014 - Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 143 (3):1214-1241.
A Decision Network Account of Reasoning About Other People’s Choices.Alan Jern & Charles Kemp - 2015 - Cognition 142:12-38.
The Psychology of Reasoning About Preferences and Unconsequential Decisions.Jean-François Bonnefon, Vittorio Girotto & Paolo Legrenzi - 2012 - Synthese 185 (S1):27-41.
Some but Not All Dispreferred Turn Markers Help to Interpret Scalar Terms in Polite Contexts.Jean-François Bonnefon, Ethan Dahl & Thomas M. Holtgraves - 2015 - Thinking and Reasoning 21 (2):230-249.
The Oxford Handbook of Causal Reasoning.Michael Waldmann (ed.) - 2017 - Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
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