Wyer and Srull have proposed that a tendency to treat conditional relationships between events as if they were biconditional underlies a number of familiar biases in human social judgment. This hypothesis was tested in a factor-analytic study in which 111 subjects completed seven measures of heuristic use and three measures of conditional reasoning. A principal components analysis of the measures revealed two main factors, corresponding to an availability dimension and a representativeness dimension. There was no evidence for the hypothesis that the disposition to infer "Y is X" given "X is Y" underlies either dimension, although one measure of conditional reasoning, Wason's selection task, was related to both. This result is discussed in terms of Evans's two-stage (heuristic/analytic processing) model of reasoning.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Adler, J. E. (1983). Abstraction is uncooperative. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 14, 165-181.
2.
Bar-Hillel, M. (1984). Representativeness and fallacies of probability judgment. Acta Psychologica, 55, 19-107.
3.
Beattie, J. , & Baron, J. (1988). Confirmation and matching biases in hypothesis testing. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 40, 269-297.
4.
Cheng, P. W. , & Holyoak, K. J. (1985). Pragmatic reasoning schemas. Cognitive Psychology, 17, 391-416.
5.
Cohen, L. J. (1981). Can human irrationality be experimentally demonstrated? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 4, 317-370.
6.
Cosmides, L. (1989). The logic of social exchange: Has natural selection shaped how humans reason? Studies with the Wason selection task. Cognition, 31, 187-276.
7.
Dulany, D. E. , & Hilton, D. J. (1991). Conversational implicature, conscious representation, and the conjunction fallacy. Social Cognition, 9, 85-110.
8.
Evans, J. St. B. T. (1984). Heuristic and analytic processes in reasoning. British Journal of Psychology, 75, 451-468.
9.
Evans, J. St. B. T. (1989). Bias in human reasoning: Causes and consequences. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
10.
Fiedler, K. (1991). The tricky nature of skewed frequency tables: An information-loss account of distinctiveness-based illusory correlations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60, 24-36.
11.
Fiedler, K. (in press). Illusory correlation and memory performance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
12.
Fischoff, B. (1975). Hindsight ≠ foresight: The effects of outcome knowledge on judgment under uncertainty. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1, 288-299.
13.
Fong, G. T. , Krantz, D. H., & Nisbett, R. E. (1986). The effects of statistical training on thinking about everyday problems. Cognitive Psychology, 18, 253-292.
14.
Fong, G. T. , & Nisbett, R. E. (1991). Immediate and delayed transfer of training effects in statistical reasoning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Genera. 120, 24-45.
15.
Griggs, R. A. , & Cox, J. R. (1982). The elusive thematic materials effect in Wason's selection task. British Journal of Psychology, 73, 407-420.
16.
Hamilton, D. L. , & Gifford, R. K. (1976). Illusory correlation in interpersonal perception: A cognitive basis of stereotypic judgments. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 12, 392-407.
17.
Hamilton, D. L. , & Sherman, S. J. (1989). Illusory correlations: Implications for stereotype theory and research. In D. Bar-Tal, C. F. Graumann, A. W. Kruglanski, & W. Stroebe (Eds.), Stereotypes and prejudice: Changing conceptions (pp. 59-82). New York: Springer-Verlag.
18.
Holland, J. H. , Holyoak, KJ., Nisbett, R. E., & Thagard, P. R. (1986). Induction: Processes of inference, learning and discover>Cambridge, MA. MIT Press.
19.
Jackson, S. L. , & Griggs, R. A. (1990). The elusive pragmatic reasoning schemas effect. Quarterly journal of Experimental Psychology, 42, 353-373.
20.
Johnson, C. , & Mullen, B. (1991). Evidence for the accessibility of paired distinctiveness in distinctiveness-based illusory correlation in stereotyping. Unpublished manuscript, Syracuse University.
21.
Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1983). Mental models. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
22.
Johnson-Laird, P. N. , Legrenzi, P., & Legrenzi, M. S. (1972). Reasoning and a sense of reality. British Journal of Psychology, 63(3), 395-400.
23.
Kahneman, D. , & Tversky, A. (1972). Subjective probability: A judgment of representativeness. Cognitive Psychology, 3, 430-454.
24.
Kahneman, D. , & Tversky, A. (1973). On the psychology of prediction. Psychological Review, 80(4), 237-251.
25.
Kahneman, D. , & Tversky, A. (1982a). On the study of statistical intuitions. Cognition, 11, 123-141.
26.
Kahneman, D. , & Tversky, A. (1982b). The simulation heuristic. In D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, & A. Tversky (Eds.),Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. New York: Cambridge University Press.
27.
Krosnick, J. A. , Li, F., & Lehman, D. R. (1990). Conversational conventions, order of information acquisition, and the effect of base-rates and individuating information on social judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 1140-1152.
28.
Lichtenstein, S. , Fischoff, B., & Phillips, L. D. (1982). Calibration of probabilities: The state of the art to 1980. In D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, & A. Tversky (Eds.), Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
29.
Miller, D. , Turnbull, W., & McFarland, C. (1990). Counterfactual thinking and social perception: Thinking about what might have been. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 23, pp. 305-331). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
30.
Miller, D. , Turnbull, W., & McFarland, C. (1989). When a coincidence is suspicious: The role of mental simulation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 581-589.
31.
Mullen, B. , & Johnson, C. (1990). Distinctiveness-based illusory correlations and stereotyping: A meta-analytic integration. British Journal of Social Psychology, 29, 11-27.
32.
Nisbett, R. E. , & Ross, L. (1980). Human inferences: Strategies and short-comings of social judgment. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
33.
Nisbett, R. E. , Fong, G. T., Lehman, D. R., & Cheng, P. W. (1987). Teaching reasoning. Science, 238, 625-631.
34.
Nunnally, J. C. (1967). Psychometric theory. New York: McGraw-Hill.
35.
Politzer, G. , & Noveck, I. A. (1991). Are conjunction rule violations the result of conversational rule violations? Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 20, 83-103.
36.
Pollard, P. (1982). Human reasoning: Some possible effects of availability. Cognition, 12, 65-96.
37.
Rips, L. J. (1990). Reasoning. Annual Review of Psychology, 41, 321-354.
38.
Ross, L. , Lepper, M. R., & Hubbard, M. (1975). Perseverance in self-perception and social perception: Biased attribution processes in the debriefing paradigm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 880-892.
39.
Schaller, M. , & Maass, A. (1989). Illusory correlation and social categorization: Toward an integration of motivational and cognitive factors in stereotype formation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56, 709-721.
40.
Schwarz, N. , Strack, E., Hilton, D. J., & Naderer, G. (1991). Base-rates, representativeness and the logic of conversation. Social Cognition, 9, 67-84.
41.
Sherman, S. J. , & Corty, E. (1984). Cognitive heuristics. In R. S. Wyer & T. K. Srull (Eds.), Handbook of social cognition (Vol. 1, pp. 189-285). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
42.
Smith, E. R. (1991). Illusory correlation in a simulated exemplar-based memory. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 27, 107-123.
43.
Stroessner, S. J. , Hamilton, D. L., & Mackie, D. M. (1992). Affect and stereotyping: The effect of induced mood on distinctiveness-based illusory correlations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62, 564-576.
44.
Tversky, A. , & Kahneman, D. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology, 5, 207-232.
45.
Tversky, A. , & Kahneman, D. (1980). Causal schemas in judgments under uncertainty. In M. Fishbein (Eds.), Progress in social psychology (Vol. 1). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
46.
Tversky, A. , & Kahneman, D. (1983). Extensional versus intuitive reasoning: The conjunction fallacy in probability judgment. Psychological Review, 90(4), 293-315.
47.
Wason, P. C. (1968). Reasoning about a rule. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 20, 273-281.
48.
Wolford, G. , Taylor, H. A., & Beck, J. R. (1990). The conjunction fallacy? Memory and Cognition, 18, 47-53.
49.
Wyer, R. S., Jr. (1977). The role of logical and nonlogical factors in making inferences about category membership. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13, 577-595.
50.
Wyer, R. S., Jr. , & Srull, T. K. (1989). Memory and cognition in its social context. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
