How to Do Things With Words

A review is presented of the book “Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment,” edited by Thomas Gilovich, Dale Griffin, and Daniel Kahneman.

Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment

語用論(Pragmatics)を考える

Much research in the last two decades has demon- strated that human responses deviate from the performance deemed normative according to various models of decision mak- ing and rational judgment (e.g., the basic axioms of utility theory). This gap between the normative and the descriptive can be inter- preted as indicating systematic irrationalities in human cognition. However, four alternative interpretations preserve the assumption that human behavior and cognition is largely rational. These posit that the gap is due to (1) performance errors, (2) computational limitations, (3) the wrong norm being applied by the experi- menter, and (4) a different construal of the task by the subject. In the debates about the viability of these alternative explanations, attention has been focused too narrowly on the modal response. In a series of experiments involving most of the classic tasks in the heuristics and biases literature, we have examined the implica- tions of individual differences in performance for each of the four explanations of the normative/descriptive gap. Performance er- rors are a minor factor in the gap; computational limitations un- derlie non-normative responding on several tasks, particularly those that involve some type of cognitive decontextualization. Un- expected patterns of covariance can suggest when the wrong norm is being applied to a task or when an alternative construal of the task should be considered appropriate.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0140525X00003435

Individual differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality debate?

The program of research now known as the heuristics and biases approach began with a survey of 84 participants at the 1969 meetings of the Mathematical Psychology Society and the American Psychological Association (Tversky & Kahneman, 1971). The respondents, including several authors of statistics texts, were asked realistic questions about the robustness of statistical estimates and the replicability of research results. The article commented tongue-in-heek on the prevalence of a belief that the law of large numbers applies to small numbers as well: Respondents placed too much confidence in the results of small samples, and their statistical judgments showed little sensitivity to sample size. The mathematical psychologists who participated in the survey not only should have known better – they did know better. Although their intuitive guesses were off the mark, most of them could have computed the correct answers on the back of an envelope. These sophisticated individuals apparently had access to two distinct approaches for answering statistical questions: one that is spontaneous, intuitive, effortless, and fast; and another that is deliberate, rule-governed, effortful, and slow. The persistence of large biases in the guesses of experts raised doubts about the educability of statistical intuitions. Moreover, it was known that the same biases affect choices in the real world, where researchers commonly select sample sizes that are too small to provide a fair test of their hypotheses (Cohen, 1969, 1992).

Representativeness revisited: Attribute substitution in intuitive judgment.

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00000126/document

When children are more logical than adults: experimental investigations of scalar implicature.

Some utterances are underinformative: The onset and time course of scalar inferences

Much developmental work has been devoted to scalar implicatures. These are implicitly communicated propositions linked to relatively weak terms (consider how Some pragmatically implies Not all) that are more likely to be carried out by adults than by children. Children tend to retain the linguistically encoded meaning of these terms (wherein Some is compatible with All). In three experiments, we gauge children's performance with scalars while investigating four factors that can have an effect on implicature production: (i) the role of (the presence or absence of) distractor items; (ii) the nature of the task (verbal judgments versus action-based judgments); (iii) the choice of scalar expression (the French quantifier quelques versus certains); and (iv) the type of scale that contextualizes the weak utterance (the affirmative All versus the negative None). Experiment 1 replicated earlier findings showing that 9-year-olds are more likely than adults to consider as true statements such as Some turtles are in...

/pdf/a-developmental-investigation-of-processing-costs-in-1koojvc9wv.pdf

A Developmental Investigation of Processing Costs in Implicature Production

https://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/courses/language_acquisition_10/readings/Noveck%20ERPs%20and%20implicatures.pdf

Characterizing the time course of an implicature: An evoked potentials study

Although a few pioneers in psycholinguistics had taken an experimental approach to various pragmatic issues for more than twenty years, it is only in the past few years that investigators have begun using experimental methods to test pragmatic hypotheses (see Noveck and Sperber 2004). We see this emergence of a proper experimental pragmatics as an important advance, with great potential for further development. In this chapter we want to illustrate what can be done with experimental approaches to pragmatic issues by considering one example, the case of so-called ‘scalar inferences’, where the experimental method has helped sharpen a theoretical debate and provided uniquely relevant evidence. We will focus on work done by the first author and his collaborators, or work closely related to theirs, but other authors have also made important contributions to the topic (e.g. Papafragou and Musolino 2003; Guasti, Chiercha, Crain, Foppolo, Gualmini and Meroni 2005; De Neys and Schaeken 2007).

Ira A. Noveck

Papers

When children are more logical than adults: experimental investigations of scalar implicature.

Some utterances are underinformative: The onset and time course of scalar inferences

A Developmental Investigation of Processing Costs in Implicature Production

Characterizing the time course of an implicature: An evoked potentials study

The Why and How of experimental pragmatics: The case of ‘Scalar Inferences’