Table Of ContentREASONING AND THINKING
Reasoning and Thinking
Ken Manktelow
University of Wolverhampton, UK
Copyright © 1999 by Psychology Press Ltd. a member of the Taylor & Francis
group.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data are available
ISBN 0-203-01556-8 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-86377-708-2 (hbk)
ISBN 0-86377-709-0 (pbk)
ISSN 1368-4558
Front cover illustration: Indecision, oil painting by Andrea Landini (1847–c.1911). Reproduced by
permission of Plymouth City Museums and Art Gallery.
In memory of John Bennett, who first taught me psychology
Contents
Series Preface vii
Acknowledgements viii
1. Reasoning and thinking: A four-way introduction 1
2. Deduction: Experiments with syllogisms 11
3. Deduction: Experiments with “if” and other 33
connectives
4. Deduction: Biases and content effects 54
5. Theories of deduction 80
6. Hypothesis testing 101
7. Induction 118
8. Judging probability 138
9. Decision making 159
10. Reasoning, thinking, and rationality 181
References 194
Author index 209
Subject index 218
Series Preface
Cognitive Psychology: A Modular Course, edited by Gerry Altmann and Susan
E.Gathercole, aims to provide undergraduates with stimulating, readable, affordable brief
texts by leading experts. Together with three other modular series, these texts will cover
all the major topics studied at undergraduate level in psychology. The companion series
are: Clinical Psychology, edited by Chris Brewin; Developmental Psychology, edited by
Peter Bryant and George Butterworth; and Social Psychology, edited by Miles Hewstone.
The series will appeal to those who want to go deeper into the subject than the traditional
textbook will allow, and base their examination answers, research, projects, assignments,
or practical decisions on a clearer and more rounded appreciation of the research
evidence.
Other titles in this series:
Essentials of Human Memory
Alan D.Baddeley
Laboratory Psychology
Julia Nunn (Ed.)
Imagery
John T.E.Richardson
Acknowledgements
Anyone who does research builds up a huge store of debts and thanks. It is difficult to do
justice to my own list, so rather than try to include everyone, and risk missing somebody
out, I shall just pick out the three people who have been my main inspiration in the work
I have done over more years than I will admit to in public: Jonathan Evans, David Over,
and Peter Wason. I have been pretty lucky with research students too, especially Neil
Fairley, Steve Kilpatrick, Tom Ormerod, and Ed Sutherland. Thanks also to all the other
psychologists from round the world with whom I have exchanged ideas, papers, and
drinks bills.
I would also like to express my gratitude to the people I work with at Wolves,
particularly Ann Henshaw and Kevin Hogan, for their constant support through both
good and less good times.
The manuscript of this book was read and commented on by Roger Dominowski, Neil
Fairley, David Hardman, Linda Miller, Mike Oaksford, David Over, and Fred Vallée-
Tourangeau, and I am grateful for the trouble they took over this. You should be too: they
are responsible for the improvements on the raw material. Rachel Windwood and,
latterly, Linda Jarrett, at the publishers, were also very helpful in dealing with my queries
and excuses. Finally, my special thanks go to Linda Miller.
K.I.MANKTELOW
1
Reasoning and thinking: A four-way
introduction
The psychological study of thinking has both a very long and a very short history. Its
long aspect comes from its antecedents in philosophy, where ideas can be traced back to
classical antiquity: Aristotle, in particular, casts a shadow stretching over more than 2000
years. On the other hand, the psychology of human thinking, as a branch of cognitive
psychology, can hardly be older than cognitive psychology itself, and the birthday of the
latter is often located in the late 1950s (see e.g. Baars, 1996). In fact, we can look to even
more recent times for the beginnings of a true cognitive psychology of thinking, to
Wason and Johnson-Laird’s Psychology of Reasoning: Structure and Content, published
in 1972.
Thought and reason are, of course, foremost among the list of properties that we often
invoke when we try to mark out what makes us different from other animals. Making
inferences is also a fundamental requirement of intelligence, so you might expect the
subject to be right in the mainstream of psychological research. In fact, this has not been
the case until very recent times. The reason for this probably lies in the ways in which the
field relates to, and feeds from, not only other areas of psychology but other disciplines
too. The clearest instance of this relation is in the way the study of reasoning has often
seemed to assess people against idealised criteria derived from formal systems such as
logic, probability theory, and decision theory. The place of normative standards in the
psychological account of thinking and reasoning is one of the core issues we shall be
concerned with in this book.
Of course, it would be a strange kind of psychology that did not concern itself with
thought, and there is now a huge and proliferating literature on reasoning and thinking,
informed by the theoretical and empirical methods of both cognitive psychology and
cognitive science. So huge, in fact, that I shall have to start by drawing some lines, before
outlining what will be covered in this text.
Some boundaries
First let me reassure those readers who dread having to get to grips with technical
systems. Although in studying reasoning you cannot totally avoid contact with logic, and
in studying decision making you must at some point look at decision theory and
probability, systems such as these will be set out only in as much detail as is necessary
for the psychology, and with a minimum of maths.
Second, as this field has taken its place in the mainstream of cognitive enquiry, so the
borderlines between it and other fields have become blurred. As a consequence, we shall
