Readers\u27 Forum: Belief in Testing

Peter Glick and Mark Snyder\u27s article [“Self-fulfilling Prophecy: The Psychology of Belief in Astrology,” May/June 1986] provides an important account of a deep-seated irrational tendency in human reasoning. They describe how people tend to test hypotheses using a verification strategy—that is, by seeking information that would sup-port the hypothesis. Such a strategy does not really test the hypothesis since it does not look for—and is thus unlikely to find—disconfirming evidence. This may account for the failure to reject not only astrology but a variety of myths, superstitions, and stereo-types

Academic Freedom as the Freedom to do Academic Work

Academic freedom is defined as the freedom to do academic work. It follows that academic freedom (1) includes freedoms of teaching, learning, and inquiry; (2) is a type of intellectual freedom; (3) is specific to academic roles and contexts; (4) is crucial at all levels of education and in all other academic contexts; (5) is individual, collective, and institutional; and (6) is central to the academic integrity of any academic endeavor or institution. This conception, which coordinates multiple traditions and literatures, enables us to explain the nature and limits of academic freedom and to justify it as a necessity for academic work. Specific academic freedom principles and policies, such as those of the AAUP, are largely consistent with this conception

Adolescents Are Young Adults, Not Immature Brains

When G. Stanley Hall (1904) wrote the first book on adolescence at the turn of the 20th century, he was describing a new cultural phenomenon that had emerged in the United States and other industrializing societies during the late 19th century. There had always been children, whether or not we theorized about them, but there had not always been adolescents. Of course, there have always been teenagers in the mathematical sense of persons who have reached the age of 13 years but not yet 20 years (and in the linguistic sense that these are the ‘‘teen’’ years in our counting scheme). But in most societies and cultural traditions teenagers were not a distinguishable group. Depending on gender they might be expected to work, marry, have children, or run a household. The Jewish Bar Mitzvah at age 13, for example, has for centuries marked entry into the adult community with full rights and responsibilities. Romeo’s Juliet was just 13 years old. Teens were young adults for most of history; there was no special category of teenagers or adolescents. Now that adolescents have been around for more than a century, however, we think they have been here forever. In fact, we theorize about them as if adolescence were a natural biological phenomenon associated with the teen years, and as if the psychological phenomena of adolescence were the predictable result of teen brains. Our thinking about adolescents, I suggest, is deeply flawed. In this guest editorial, expanding on previous publications (Moshman, 2011a, 2011b, 2011c), I identify five fallacies

Diversity in reasoning and rationality: Metacognitive and developmental considerations

Tasks in the adult reasoning literature are designed so that heuristic processing leads one astray and adequate rule-based processing requires explicit knowledge about applicable logical and quasi-logical norms. Other research, however, indicates that appropriate rule-based inferences can be automatic. Individual differences in rationality are largely due to differences in developmental progress toward metacognitive understanding of both heuristic and rule-based inferences

Representation and Process in Reasoning about Logical Relationships

According to a popular conception of reasoning, the thinker first mentally represents given information and then processes the resulting representations. It is commonly assumed, at least implicitly, that difficulty of the representation step is solely a function of facility with the form and content of the information to be represented, while difficulty of the processing step is solely a function of facility with the operation(s) necessary to meet the task requirements. Within this two-step information processing model, form/content variables and task requirements should thus have an additive effect on problem difficulty. To test this prediction, 72 male students in grades 7, 10, and college were presented with two tasks involving the same set of logical propositions. The effects of both form and content were found to be a function of task. These interactions seem to contradict the notion that form/content and task variables relate exclusively to different steps in reasoning. Theoretical implications of these results for the concepts of representation and process are discussed from information-processing, statistical, and structural perspectives

Four campus free speech problems solved

Concerns about free speech in higher education have reached the point where at least 30 state legislatures have considered, and nearly a dozen – including Arizona and Virginia – have passed, laws to protect campus speech. The concerns about campus free speech cluster around four problems: speech zones, speech codes, disinvitations and ideological biases

Some comments on Brée & Coppens’ “The difficulty of an implication task”

In a recent article in this Journal, Brée & Coppens (1976) tested Brée’s (1973) model of performance on Wason’s extensively studied “four-card task.” The Brée model is of considerable interest in that it (a) differentiates comprehension of the proposition to be tested from the hypothesis- testing strategy itself (as do Smalley, 1974, and Moshman, 1977), and (b) is closely related to Piaget’s theory of formal operations (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958) in its consideration of combinatorial analysis (elaboration of possibilities) and hypothetico-deductive reasoning (reasoning based on possibilities rather than facts). Unfortunately, the test of the model is marred both by incorrect predictions and questionable exclusion of subjects from the data analysis

Evolution and Development of Reasoning and Argumentation: Commentary on Mercier (2011)

For anyone who loves a strong major thesis—and I do—Mercier’s “Reasoning serves argumentation in children” [this issue] obliges right from the title. And for anyone who loves a carefully structured defense of a provocative perspective—and who does not?—Mercier’s article continues to fill the bill. The “argumentative theory of reasoning” maintains that “reasoning is a fundamentally social ability” that “has evolved to serve argumentive ends: finding and evaluating arguments in a dialogic context.” There appear to be two distinguishable theses here: first, reasoning serves argumentive ends; second, reasoning has evolved. In their moderate versions, each thesis is true and useful; their stronger versions, however, are questionable and misleading. Reasoning is both social and individual, with roots in the human genome, sensorimotor action, and subsequent individual and social coordinations and reflections. Thus reasoning serves argumentive purposes among others, and what evolves is a tendency toward developmental processes that, in supportive environments, generate progress in reasoning and argumentation

Book Review: Psychoanalyzing Prejudice

The classic psychological work on prejudice is Gordon Allport’s 1954 The Nature of Prejudice. Half a century later, its definitive modern counterpart must surely be On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years after Allport (2005). Systematically reconsidering Allport’s work in light of subsequent research and theorizing, On the Nature of Prejudice provides, in one carefully edited volume, the most comprehensive statement on the psychology of prejudice currently available. The Future of Prejudice: Psychoanalysis and the Prevention of Prejudice, in contrast, is simply a collection of sixteen chapters that, although generally psychoanalytic in orientation, vary greatly in form, content, scope, and quality. Even if the book as a whole does not make a contribution greater than the sum of its parts, however, there is much of interest in the various parts. There are at least two important respects in which On the Nature of Prejudice and The Future of Prejudice resemble each other and Allport’s original work. The first is that they are efforts to provide a psychological understanding of prejudice. Prejudice is not dismissed as the inexplicable result of evil in the world. Rather, it is seen as a natural phenomenon subject to psychological explanation. Second, prejudice in its basic forms is seen as normative rather than exceptional or pathological. We all have prejudices, and the explanation of our prejudices is rooted in our general psychological characteristics. Furthermore, there are at least two important respects in which The Future of Prejudice differs from both On the Nature of Prejudice and Allport’s original volume. One is that The Future of Prejudice highlights psychoanalytic approaches to prejudice, such as a focus on stranger anxiety in infancy as an explanation for prejudicial tendencies. On the Nature of Prejudice, in contrast, is rooted in cognitive social psychology, as was Allport’s original volume (which was ahead of its time in this regard). Prejudice was seen by Allport, and continues to be seen by social psychologists of the twenty-first century, as originating in general aspects of our perception and thinking, not in early attachments and associated experiences