Confirmation bias, as the term is typically used in the psychological literature, connotes the seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations, or a h...

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Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises:

The literature on interference in the Stroop Color-Word Task, covering over 50 years and some 400 studies, is organized and reviewed. In so doing, a set of 18 reliable empirical finding is isolated that must be captured by any successful theory of the Stroop effect. Existing theoretical positions are summarized and evaluated in view of this critical evidence and the 2 major candidate theories ―relative speed of processing and automaticity of reading― are found to be wanting. It is concluded that recent theories placing the explanatory weight on parallel processing of the irrelevant and the relevant dimensions are likely to be more sucessful than are earlier theories attempting to locate a single bottleneck in attention

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Half a century of research on the Stroop effect: an integrative review.

This article reviews a diverse set of proposals for dual processing in higher cognition within largely disconnected literatures in cognitive and social psychology. All these theories have in common the distinction between cognitive processes that are fast, automatic, and unconscious and those that are slow, deliberative, and conscious. A number of authors have recently suggested that there may be two architecturally (and evolutionarily) distinct cognitive systems underlying these dual-process accounts. However, it emerges that (a) there are multiple kinds of implicit processes described by different theorists and (b) not all of the proposed attributes of the two kinds of processing can be sensibly mapped on to two systems as currently conceived. It is suggested that while some dual-process theories are concerned with parallel competing processes involving explicit and implicit knowledge systems, others are concerned with the influence of preconscious processes that contextualize and shape deliberative reasoning and decision-making.

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Dual-Processing Accounts of Reasoning, Judgment, and Social Cognition

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

Distinctions have been proposed between systems of reasoning for centuries. This article distills properties shared by many of these distinctions and characterizes the resulting systems in light of recent findings and theoretical developments. One system is associative because its computations reflect similarity structure and relations of temporal contiguity. The other is "rule based" because it operates on symbolic structures that have logical content and variables and because its computations have the properties that are normally assigned to rules. The systems serve complementary functions and can simultaneously generate different solutions to a reasoning problem. The rule-based system can suppress the associative system but not completely inhibit it. The article reviews evidence in favor of the distinction and its characterization. One of the oldest conundrums in psychology is whether people are best conceived as parallel processors of information who operate along diffuse associative links or as analysts who operate by deliberate and sequential manipulation of internal representations. Are inferences drawn through a network of learned associative pathways or through application of a kind of"psychologic" that manipulates symbolic tokens in a rule-governed way? The debate has raged (again) in cognitive psychology for almost a decade now. It has pitted those who prefer models of mental phenomena to be built out of networks of associative devices that pass activation around in parallel and distributed form (the way brains probably function) against those who prefer models built out of formal languages in which symbols are composed into sentences that are processed sequentially (the way computers function). An obvious solution to the conundrum is to conceive of the

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The empirical case for two systems of reasoning.

Conditional reasoning theories of propositional reasoning - rules versus models the Wason selection task disjunctive reasoning relational inferences syllogistic reasoning reasoning with quantifiers - beyond syllogisms.

Human Reasoning: The Psychology Of Deduction

The incidence and causes of cheating were investigated using a questionnaire, consisting of 21 cheating behaviors, which was distributed to students at an English university. Respondents were asked to indicate, confidentially, which of the behaviors they had engaged in. Reported cheating was widespread and some types of cheating (e.g., on coursework) were more common than others. Reported cheating was more common in men than women; more common with less able students than more able ones; more common in younger students than mature ones; and more common in science and technology students than those in other disciplines. It is suggested that students' motivation, in particular whether they are studying to learn rather than simply to obtain good grades, is a major factor in explaining these differences. The results also indicate that cheating consists of a number of different types of behavior rather than being a unitary concept.

Individual differences in student cheating.

A questionnaire measuring nine different aspects of teachers’ beliefs and intentions concerning teaching in higher education was distributed to teachers at four institutions in the United Kingdom, yielding 638 complete sets of responses There was a high degree of overlap between the participants’ scores on the subscales measuring beliefs and intentions, and analyses of both sets of scores yielded two factors reflecting an orientation towards learning facilitation and an orientation towards knowledge transmission However, teachers’ intentions were more orientated towards knowledge transmission than were their beliefs, and problem solving was associated with beliefs based on learning facilitation but with intentions based on knowledge transmission Differences in teachers’ intentions across different disciplines and between men and women seemed to result from different conceptions of teaching, whereas differences in teachers’ intentions across different institutions and between teachers with different levels of teaching experience seemed to result from contextual factors Teaching intentions thus reflect a compromise between teachers’ conceptions of teaching and their academic and social contexts

Teachers’ beliefs and intentions concerning teaching in higher education

Research on undergraduate cheating behaviour is in its infancy in the UK. The paper reports data from a series of studies across different academic disciplines and different institutions. The first study was designed to assess staff and student perceptions of the seriousness and frequency of different kinds of cheating. This enabled a comprehensive set of cheating behaviours to be developed. A second study utilised this set to elicit self-reports by undergraduates, who also gave reasons for indulging (or not) in each type of behaviour. Behaviours such as: copying each other's work, plagiarism, and altering and inventing research data were admitted to by more than 60% of the students. Data with respect to age, gender, discipline and institution are discussed along with the implications of these results for all in higher education.

Stephen E. Newstead

Papers

Human Reasoning: The Psychology Of Deduction

Individual differences in student cheating.

Teachers’ beliefs and intentions concerning teaching in higher education

Undergraduate Cheating: Who Does What and Why?.

The source of belief bias effects in syllogistic reasoning.