“The belief bias in reasoning occurs when individuals are more willing to accept conclusions that are consistent with their beliefs than conclusions that are inconsistent. the present study examined a belief bias in syllogisms containing political content. in two experiments, participants judged whether conclusions were valid, completed political ideology measures, and completed a cognitive reflection test. the conclusions varied in validity and in their political ideology (conservative or liberal). participants were sensitive to syllogisms’ validity and conservatism. overall, they showed a liberal bias, accepting more liberal than conservative conclusions. furthermore, conservative participants accepted more conservative conclusions than liberal conclusions, whereas liberal participants showed the opposite pattern. cognitive reflection did not magnify this effect as predicted by a motivated system 2 reasoning account of motivated ideological reasoning. these results suggest that people with different ideologies may accept different conclusions from the same evidence.”

“Belief bias is the tendency in syllogistic reasoning to rely on prior beliefs rather than to fully obey logical principles. few studies have investigated the age effect on belief bias. although several studies have recently begun to explore this topic, little is known about the psychological mechanisms underlying such an effect. accordingly, we investigated belief bias in older and young adults and explored the roles of working memory (wm) and need for cognition (nfc) in the relationship between age and reasoning performance. we found that older adults showed a lower accuracy rate compared with young adults when conclusion believability and logical validity were incongruent. however, older adults showed a higher accuracy rate compared with young adults when conclusion believability and logical validity were congruent. the results indicated that in comparison with young adults, prior beliefs hampered logical reasoning more significantly in older adults under incongruent conditions and boosted logical reasoning more significantly under congruent conditions. moreover, the logic index in older adults was significantly lower than in young adults, and the interaction index of believability and validity in older adults was significantly below zero. furthermore, nfc mediated the age effect on reasoning performance under the two conditions. by contrast, wm mediated the age effect on reasoning performance only under incongruent conditions and did not act as a mediator under congruent conditions.”

“A novel explanation of belief bias in relational reasoning is presented based on the role of working memory and retrieval in deductive reasoning, and the influence of prior knowledge on this process. it is proposed that belief bias is caused by the believability of a conclusion in working memory which influences its activation level, determining its likelihood of retrieval and therefore its effect on the reasoning process. this theory explores two main influences of belief on the activation levels of these conclusions. first, believable conclusions have higher activation levels and so are more likely to be recalled during the evaluation of reasoning problems than unbelievable conclusions, and therefore, they have a greater influence on the reasoning process. secondly, prior beliefs about the conclusion have a base level of activation and may be retrieved when logically irrelevant, influencing the evaluation of the problem. the theory of activation and memory is derived from the atomic components of thought-rational (act-r) cognitive architecture and so this account is formalized in an act-r cognitive model. two experiments were conducted to test predictions of this model. experiment 1 tested strength of belief and experiment 2 tested the impact of a concurrent working memory load. both of these manipulations increased the main effect of belief overall and in particular raised belief-based responding in indeterminately invalid problems. these effects support the idea that the activation level of conclusions formed during reasoning influences belief bias. this theory adds to current explanations of belief bias by providing a detailed specification of the role of working memory and how it is influenced by prior knowledge. © 2012 cognitive science society, inc.”

“This study investigated ideological belief bias, and whether this effect is moderated by analytical thinking. a swedish nationally representative sample (n = 1005) evaluated non-political and political syllogisms and were asked whether the conclusions followed logically from the premises. the correct response in the political syllogisms was aligned with either leftist or rightist political ideology. political orientation predicted response accuracy for political but not non-political syllogisms. overall, the participants correctly evaluated more syllogisms when the correct response was congruent with their ideology, particularly on hot-button issues (asylum to refugees, climate change, gender-neutral education, and school marketization). analytical thinking predicted higher accuracy for syllogisms of any kind among leftists, but it predicted accuracy only for leftist and non-political syllogisms among rightists. this research contributes by refining a promising paradigm for studying politically motivated reasoning, demonstrating ideological belief bias outside of the united states across diverse political issues, and providing the first evidence that analytical thinking may reduce such bias.”

“The belief-bias effect is one of the most-studied biases in reasoning. a recent study of the phenomenon using the signal detection theory (sdt) model called into question all theoretical accounts of belief bias by demonstrating that belief-based differences in the ability to discriminate between valid and invalid syllogisms may be an artifact stemming from the use of inappropriate linear measurement models such as analysis of variance (dube et al., psychological review, 117(3), 831–863, 2010). the discrepancy between dube et al.’s, psychological review, 117(3), 831–863 (2010) results and the previous three decades of work, together with former’s methodological criticisms suggests the need to revisit earlier results, this time collecting confidence-rating responses. using a hierarchical bayesian meta-analysis, we reanalyzed a corpus of 22 confidence-rating studies (n = 993). the results indicated that extensive replications using confidence-rating data are unnecessary as the observed receiver operating characteristic functions are not systematically asymmetric. these results were subsequently corroborated by a novel experimental design based on sdt’s generalized area theorem. although the meta-analysis confirms that believability does not influence discriminability unconditionally, it also confirmed previous results that factors such as individual differences mediate the effect. the main point is that data from previous and future studies can be safely analyzed using appropriate hierarchical methods that do not require confidence ratings. more generally, our results set a new standard for analyzing data and evaluating theories in reasoning. important methodological and theoretical considerations for future work on belief bias and related domains are discussed.”

“Models based on signal detection theory (sdt) have occupied a prominent role in domains such as perception, categorization, and memory. recent work by dube et al. (2010) suggests that the framework may also offer important insights in the domain of deductive reasoning. belief bias in reasoning has traditionally been examined using indices based on raw endorsement rates-indices that critics have claimed are highly problematic. we discuss a new set of sdt indices fit for the investigation belief bias and apply them to new data examining the effect of perceptual disfluency on belief bias in syllogisms. in contrast to the traditional approach, the sdt indices do not violate important statistical assumptions, resulting in a decreased type 1 error rate. based on analyses using these novel indices we demonstrate that perceptual disfluency leads to decreased reasoning accuracy, contrary to predictions. disfluency also appears to eliminate the typical link found between cognitive ability and the effect of beliefs on accuracy. finally, replicating previous work, we demonstrate that cognitive ability leads to an increase in reasoning accuracy and a decrease in the response bias component of belief bias. © 2014 trippas, handley and verde.”

“This study investigated the relationship between belief bias and fear of negative evaluation. belief bias refers to a bias in deductive reasoning that acts to confirm rather than falsify prior beliefs. participants (n = 52) with varying levels of fear of negative evaluation completed a belief bias task by means of linear syllogisms, with stimuli covering both social anxiety convictions and factual neutral statements. a linear relationship was found between fear of negative evaluation and belief bias for the social anxiety conviction category. no differences in reasoning were found for the neutral syllogisms. these results support the view that highly socially anxious individuals do not have a reasoning abnormality, but do have difficulty judging anxiogenic information as false and reassuring convictions-contradicting information as true. such belief bias logically prevents dysfunctional cognitions from being corrected, thereby sustaining phobic fear. © 2009 springer science+business media, llc.”

“Philosophers are divided over whether implicit biases are beliefs. critics of the belief model of implicit bias argue that empirical data show that implicit biases are habitual but unstable and not sensitive to evidence. they are not rational or consistently action-guiding like beliefs are supposed to be. in contrast, proponents of the belief model of implicit bias argue that they are stable enough, sensitive to some evidence, and do guide our actions, albeit haphazardly sometimes. with the help of revisionary notions of belief, such as fragmented, spinozan, and dispositional belief, these theorists argue that implicit biases are beliefs. i argue that both the critiques and defenses of belief models of implicit bias are problematic. this methodological critique suggests that debates about nature of the implicit bias ought to shift away from the belief question and toward more fundamental questions about stability and evidential sensitivity of implicit biases. i chart the path forward for this prescribed shift in the debate.”

“The previous research attempts to reduce the influence of the belief bias on deductive thinking have often been unsuccessful and, when they succeeded, they failed to replicate. in this paper, we propose a new way to see an old problem. instead of considering the analytical abilities of the respondent, we focus on the communicative characteristics of the experimental task. by changing the pragmatics into play through a subtle manipulation of the instruction of the syllogism problem, we obtained a strong improvement in the accuracy of the performance in both untrained and trained in logic respondents. we suggest that current models of deductive thinking should be broadened to consider also communicative understanding as part of the processing of the problem.”

“A myriad of explainability methods have been proposed in recent years, but there is little consensus on how to evaluate them. while automatic metrics allow for quick benchmarking, it isn’t clear how such metrics reflect human interaction with explanations. human evaluation is of paramount importance, but previous protocols fail to account for belief biases affecting human performance, which may lead to misleading conclusions. we provide an overview of belief bias, its role in human evaluation, and ideas for nlp practitioners on how to account for it. for two experimental paradigms, we present a case study of gradient-based explainability introducing simple ways to account for humans’ prior beliefs: models of varying quality and adversarial examples. we show that conclusions about the highest performing methods change when introducing such controls, pointing to the importance of accounting for belief bias in evaluation.”

“Belief bias is the tendency for prior beliefs to influence people’s deductive reasoning in two ways: through the application of a simple belief-heuristic (response bias) and through the application of more effortful reasoning for unbelievable conclusions (accuracy effect or motivated reasoning). previous research indicates that cognitive ability is the primary determinant of the effect of beliefs on accuracy. in the current study, we show that the mere tendency to engage analytic reasoning (analytic cognitive style) is responsible for the effect of cognitive ability on motivated reasoning. the implications of this finding for our understanding of the impact of individual differences on belief bias are discussed.”

“When asked to determine whether a syllogistic argument is deductively valid, people are influenced by their prior beliefs about the believability of the conclusion. recently, two competing explanations for this belief bias effect have been proposed, each based on signal detection theory (sdt). under a response bias explanation, people set more lenient decision criteria for believable than for unbelievable arguments. under the alternative argument strength explanation, believability affects the reasoning stage of processing an argument, with believable and unbelievable arguments differing in subjective strength for both valid and invalid items. two experiments tested these accounts by asking participants to make validity judgments for categorical syllogisms and to rate their confidence. conclusion-believability was manipulated both within group (experiment 1) and between groups (experiment 2). a novel two-step version of the signal detection model was fit to receiver operating characteristic (roc) curves for believable and unbelievable arguments. model fits confirmed that in both experiments there was a shift in decision criterion but not argument discriminability as a function of argument believability. crucially, when believability is manipulated between groups, this shift is expected under the response bias account but not under the argument strength account. therefore, the results support the view that belief bias primarily reflects changes in response bias: people require less evidence to endorse a syllogism as valid when it has a believable conclusion. this has important implications for theories of deductive reasoning.”

“A belief bias effect in syllogistic reasoning (evans, barston, & pollard, 1983) is observed when subjects accept more valid than invalid arguments and more believable than unbelievable conclusions and show greater overall accuracy in judging arguments with unbelievable conclusions. the effect is measured with a contrast of contrasts, comparing the acceptance rates for valid and invalid arguments with believable and unbelievable conclusions. we show that use of this measure entails the assumption of a threshold model, which predicts linear receiver operating characteristics (rocs). in 3 experiments, subjects made ‘ valid’ /” invalid” responses to syllogisms, followed by confidence ratings that allowed the construction of empirical rocs; rocs were also constructed from a base-rate manipulation in one experiment. in all cases, the form of the empirical rocs was curved and therefore inconsistent with the assumptions of klauer, musch, and naumer’s (2000) multinomial model of belief bias. we propose a more appropriate, signal detection-based model of belief bias. we then use that model to develop theoretically sound and empirically justified measures of decision accuracy and response bias; those measures demonstrate that the belief bias effect is simply a response bias effect. thus, our data and analyses challenge existing theories of belief bias because those theories predict an accuracy effect that our data suggest is a type i error. our results also provide support for processing theories of deduction that assume responses are driven by a graded argument-strength variable, such as the probability heuristic model proposed by chater and oaksford (1999). © 2010 american psychological association.”

“Recent results have challenged the widespread assumption of dual process models of belief bias that sound reasoning relies on slow, careful reflection, whereas biased reasoning is based on fast intuition. instead, parallel process models of reasoning suggest that rule- and belief-based problem features are processed in parallel and that reasoning problems that elicit a conflict between rule- and belief-based problem features may also elicit more than one type 1 response. this has important implications for individual-differences research on reasoning, because rule-based responses by certain individuals may reflect that these individuals were either more likely to give a rule-based default response or that they successfully inhibited and overrode a belief-based default response. in two studies, we used the diffusion model to describe decision making in a transitive reasoning task. in study 1, 41 participants were asked to evaluate conclusions based on their validity. in study 2, 133 participants evaluated conclusions based on their validity or believability. we tested which diffusion model parameters reflected conflict resolution and related those model parameters to individual differences in cognitive abilities and thinking styles. individual differences in need for cognition predicted successful conflict resolution under logic instruction, which suggests that a disposition to engage in reflective thinking facilitates the inhibition and override of type 1 responses. intelligence, however, was negatively related to successful conflict resolution under belief instruction, which suggests that individuals with high cognitive abilities quickly generated a higher-level logical response that interfered with their ability to evaluate lower-level intrinsic problem features. taken together, this double dissociation indicates that cognitive abilities and thinking styles affect the processing of conflict information through different mechanisms and at different stages: greater cognitive abilities facilitate the efficient creation of decoupled problem representations, whereas a greater disposition to engage in critical thinking facilitates the detection and override of type 1 responses.”

“In deductive reasoning, believable conclusions are more likely to be accepted regardless of their validity. although many theories argue that this belief bias reflects a change in the quality of reasoning, distinguishing qualitative changes from simple response biases can be difficult (dube, rotello, & heit, 2010). we introduced a novel procedure that controls for response bias. in experiments 1 and 2, the task required judging which of two simultaneously presented syllogisms was valid. surprisingly, there was no evidence for belief bias with this forced choice procedure. in experiment 3, the procedure was modified so that only one set of premises was viewable at a time. an effect of beliefs emerged: unbelievable conclusions were judged more accurately, supporting the claim that beliefs affect the quality of reasoning. experiments 4 and 5 replicated and extended this finding, showing that the effect was mediated by individual differences in cognitive ability and analytic cognitive style. although the positive findings of experiments 3-5 are most relevant to the debate about the mechanisms underlying belief bias, the null findings of experiments 1 and 2 offer insight into how the presentation of an argument influences the manner in which people reason.”

“Background and objectives it has been proposed that people with delusions have difficulty inhibiting beliefs (i.e., ‘doxastic inhibition’) so as to reason about them as if they might not be true. we used a continuity approach to test this proposal in non-clinical adults scoring high and low in psychometrically assessed delusion-proneness. high delusion-prone individuals were expected to show greater difficulty than low delusion-prone individuals on ‘conflict’ items of a ‘belief-bias’ reasoning task (i.e. when required to reason logically about statements that conflicted with reality), but not on ‘non-conflict’ items. methods twenty high delusion-prone and twenty low delusion-prone participants (according to the peters et al. delusions inventory) completed a belief-bias reasoning task and tests of iq, working memory and general inhibition (excluded letter fluency, stroop and hayling sentence completion). results high delusion-prone individuals showed greater difficulty than low delusion-prone individuals on the stroop and excluded letter fluency tests of inhibition, but no greater difficulty on the conflict versus non-conflict items of the belief-bias task. they did, however, make significantly more errors overall on the belief-bias task, despite controlling for iq, working memory and general inhibitory control. limitations the study had a relatively small sample size and used non-clinical participants to test a theory of cognitive processing in individuals with clinically diagnosed delusions. conclusions results failed to support a role for doxastic inhibitory failure in non-clinical delusion-prone individuals. these individuals did, however, show difficulty with conditional reasoning about statements that may or may not conflict with reality, independent of any general cognitive or inhibitory deficits.”

“In two experiments we tested the hypothesis that the mechanisms that produce belief bias generalise across reasoning tasks. in formal reasoning (i.e., syllogisms) judgements of validity are influenced by actual validity, believability of the conclusions, and an interaction between the two. although apparently analogous effects of belief and argument strength have been observed in informal reasoning, the design of those studies does not permit an analysis of the interaction effect. in the present studies we redesigned two informal reasoning tasks: the argument evaluation task (aet) and a law of large numbers (lln) task in order to test the similarity of the phenomena concerned. our findings provide little support for the idea that belief bias on formal and informal reasoning is a unitary phenomenon. first, there was no correlation across individuals in the extent of belief bias shown on the three tasks. second, evidence for belief by strength interaction was observed only on aet and under conditions not required for the comparable finding on syllogistic reasoning. finally, we found that while conclusion believability strongly influenced assessments of arguments strength, it had a relatively weak influence on the verbal justifications offered on the two informal reasoning tasks. © 2012 copyright taylor and francis group, llc.”

“Three studies examine the influence of varying the difficulty of reasoning on the extent of belief bias, while minimising the possibility that the manipulation would influence the way participants approach the task. specifically, reasoning difficulty was manipulated by making variations in problem content, while maintaining all other aspects of the problems constant. in study 1, 191 participants were presented with consistent and conflict problems varying in two levels of difficulty. the results showed a significant influence of problem difficulty on the extent of the belief bias, such that the effect of belief was more pronounced for difficult problems. this effect was stronger in study 2 (73 participants) where the difference in the difficulty of the problems was purposely accentuated. the results of both studies stress the importance of controlling for problem difficulty when studying belief bias. study 3 examined one consequence of this, i.e., the classic belief vs. logic interaction could be eliminated by manipulating problem difficulty. theoretical implications for dual-process accounts of belief bias are also discussed. © 2014 taylor & francis.”

“It is commonly assumed that belief-based reasoning is fast and automatic, whereas rule-based reasoning is slower and more effortful. dual-process theories of reasoning rely on this speed-asymmetry explanation to account for a number of reasoning phenomena, such as base-rate neglect and belief-bias. the goal of the current study was to test this hypothesis about the relative speed of belief-based and rule-based processes. participants solved base-rate problems (experiment 1) and conditional inferences (experiment 2) under a challenging deadline, they then gave a second response in free time. we found that fast responses were informed by rules of probability and logical validity, and that slow responses incorporated belief-based information. implications for dual-process theories and future research options for dissociating type i and type ii processes are discussed.”

“Background and objectives it has been proposed that people with delusions have difficulty inhibiting beliefs (i.e., ‘doxastic inhibition’) so as to reason about them as if they might not be true. we used a continuity approach to test this proposal in non-clinical adults scoring high and low in psychometrically assessed delusion-proneness. high delusion-prone individuals were expected to show greater difficulty than low delusion-prone individuals on ‘conflict’ items of a ‘belief-bias’ reasoning task (i.e. when required to reason logically about statements that conflicted with reality), but not on ‘non-conflict’ items. methods twenty high delusion-prone and twenty low delusion-prone participants (according to the peters et al. delusions inventory) completed a belief-bias reasoning task and tests of iq, working memory and general inhibition (excluded letter fluency, stroop and hayling sentence completion). results high delusion-prone individuals showed greater difficulty than low delusion-prone individuals on the stroop and excluded letter fluency tests of inhibition, but no greater difficulty on the conflict versus non-conflict items of the belief-bias task. they did, however, make significantly more errors overall on the belief-bias task, despite controlling for iq, working memory and general inhibitory control. limitations the study had a relatively small sample size and used non-clinical participants to test a theory of cognitive processing in individuals with clinically diagnosed delusions. conclusions results failed to support a role for doxastic inhibitory failure in non-clinical delusion-prone individuals. these individuals did, however, show difficulty with conditional reasoning about statements that may or may not conflict with reality, independent of any general cognitive or inhibitory deficits.”

“The belief-bias effect in syllogistic reasoning refers to the tendency for subjects to be erroneously biased when logical conclusions are incongruent with belief about the world. this study examined the role of inferior frontal cortex (ifc) in belief-bias reasoning using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rtms). we used an off-line rtms method to disrupt ifc activity transiently. right ifc stimulation significantly impaired incongruent reasoning performance, enhancing the belief-bias effect. subjects whose right ifc was impaired by rtms may not be able to inhibit irrelevant semantic processing in incongruent trials. although left ifc stimulation impaired congruent reasoning, it paradoxically facilitated incongruent reasoning performance, eliminating the belief-bias effect. subjects whose left ifc was impaired by rtms may not suffer from interference by irrelevant semantic processing. this study demonstrates for the first time the roles of left and right ifc in belief-bias reasoning using an rtms approach. © 2010 elsevier ltd.”