Psychology and Indicative Conditionals
Most behavioral experiments on conditionals in the psychology of reasoning have been carried out with indicative conditionals, causal conditionals, and counterfactual conditionals. People readily make the modus ponens inference, that is, given if A then B, and given A, they conclude B, but only about half of participants in experiments make the modus tollens inference, that is, given if A then B, and given not-B, only about half of participants conclude not-A, the remainder say that nothing follows (Evans et al., 1993). When participants are given counterfactual conditionals, they make both the modus ponens and the modus tollens inferences (Byrne, 2005).
Read more about this topic: Indicative Conditional
Famous quotes containing the words psychology and, psychology and/or indicative:
“A writer must always try to have a philosophy and he should also have a psychology and a philology and many other things. Without a philosophy and a psychology and all these various other things he is not really worthy of being called a writer. I agree with Kant and Schopenhauer and Plato and Spinoza and that is quite enough to be called a philosophy. But then of course a philosophy is not the same thing as a style.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Psychology has nothing to say about what women are really like, what they need and what they want, essentially because psychology does not know.... this failure is not limited to women; rather, the kind of psychology that has addressed itself to how people act and who they are has failed to understand in the first place why people act the way they do, and certainly failed to understand what might make them act differently.”
—Naomi Weisstein, U.S. psychologist, feminist, and author. Psychology Constructs the Female (1969)
“Could anything be more indicative of a slight but general insanity than the aspect of the crowd on the streets of Chicago?”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)