The Effects of Belief Change on Prior and Consequent Beliefs (original) (raw)

Order effects in belief updating: The belief-adjustment model

Cognitive Psychology, 1992

Much literature attests to the existence of order effects in the updating of beliefs. However, under what conditions do primacy, recency, or no order effects occur? This paper presents a theory of belief updating that explicitly accounts for order-effect phenomena as arising from the interaction of information-processing strategies and task characteristics. Key task variables identified are complexity of the stimuli, length of the series of evidence items, and response mode (Step-by-

Order effects in human belief revision

1998

Abstract The order effect, a phenomenon in which the final belief is significantly affected by the temporal order of information presentation, is a robust empirical finding in human belief revision. This paper investigates how order effects occur on the basis that human belief has a coherence foundation and a probability/confidence distinction. Both the experimental results and the UEcho modeling suggest that confidence play an important role in human belief revision.

Human belief revision and the order effect

2000

Abstract The order effect, a phenomenon in which the final belief is significantly affected by the temporal order of information presentation, is a robust empirical finding in human belief revision. This paper investigates how order effects occur, on the basis that human belief has a coherence foundation and a probability/confidence distinction. Both the experimental results and the UEcho modeling suggest that confidence plays an important role in human belief revision.

ON CAUSAL AND CONSTRUCTIVE MODELLING OF BELIEF CHANGE

Our life in various phases can be construed as involving continuous belief revision activity with a bundle of accepted beliefs, unaccepted beliefs (disbelief) and some even misunderstood beliefs. What is evident from such an activity is that we pass through various phases of our life effortlessly without being conscious of the rationale 1 for such changing sets of beliefs. In this process, we give up many mistakenly held beliefs of the earlier phase and replace them with new sets of belief. Of course, in the process, one sometimes undertakes the examination of evidence and resorts to reasoning leading finally to a new set of beliefs. 2 . Thus, both our beliefs and knowledge. At this moment we would not make a fine philosophical distinction between "beliefs" and "knowledge" (defined often as"justified true belief") are in a constant state of flux.

Belief Change as Propositional Update

Cognitive Science, 1997

In this study, we examine the problem of belief revision, defined as deciding whic h of several initially-accepted sentences to disbelieve, when new information presents a l ogical inconsistency with the initial set. In the first three experiments, the initial sentence set included a conditional sentence, a non-conditional sentence, and an inferred conclusi on drawn from the first two. The new information contradicted the inferred conclusion.

Journal of Mathematical Psychology 47 (2003) 1–31 A theory of belief

1999

A theory of belief is presented in which uncertainty has two dimensions. The two dimensions have a variety of interpretations. The article focusses on two of these interpretations. The first is that one dimension corresponds to probability and the other to ‘‘definiteness,’ ’ which itself has a variety of interpretations. One interpretation of definiteness is as the ordinal inverse of an aspect of uncertainty called ‘‘ambiguity’ ’ that is often considered important in the decision theory literature. (Greater ambiguity produces less definiteness and vice versa.) Another interpretation of definiteness is as a factor that measures the distortion of an individual’s probability judgments that is due to specific factors involved in the cognitive processing leading to judgments. This interpretation is used to provide a new foundation for support theories of probability judgments and a new formulation of the ‘‘Unpacking Principle’ ’ of Tversky and Koehler. The second interpretation of the tw...

Belief Revision and Uncertain Reasoning

When a new piece of information contradicts a currently held belief, one has to modify the set of beliefs in order to restore its consistency. In the case where it is necessary to give up a belief, some of them are less likely to be abandoned than others. The concept of epistemic entrenchment is used by some AI approaches to explain this fact based on formal properties of the belief set (e. g. , transitivity). Two experiments were designed to test the hypothesis that contrary to such views, (i) belief is naturally represented by degrees rather than in an all-or-nothing manner, (ii) entrenchment is primarily a matter of content and not only a matter of form, and (iii) consequently prior degree of belief is a powerful factor of change. The two experiments used Elio and Pelletier's (1997) paradigm in which participants were presented with full simple deductive arguments whose conclusion was denied, following which they were asked to decide which premise to revise. Belief revision 3 Belief Revision and Uncertain Reasoning Changing belief is a pervasive mental activity. It occurs when the course of events does not meet the individual's expectations, or when indisputable facts run counter to the individual's anticipations. It also occurs during communication (e. g. , upon being convinced by one's interlocutor), in learning, in problem solving when new data transform the problem space, etc. This work addresses belief change by asking, How does an individual react when (s)he receives new information that contradicts some logical entailment of his/her current beliefs? More precisely, consider an individual

Iffy beliefs: conditional thinking and belief change

Memory & cognition, 2007

The ability to entertain possibilities and draw inferences about them is essential to human intelligence. We examine the hypothesis that conditional if-then statements trigger a mental simulation process in which people suppose the antecedent (if statement) to be true and evaluate the consequent (then statement) in that context. On the assumption that supposing an event to be true increases belief that the event has occurred or will occur, this hypothesis is consistent with the claim that evaluating a conditional will heighten belief in its antecedent more than in its consequent. Two experiments, employing conditionals of the form If animal A has property X, then animal B will have property X, in which X was a property that people could not readily relate to the animals, supported this claim. The effect was stronger following the evaluation of conditionals with dissimilar animal categories.

Updating beliefs in light of uncertain evidence: Descriptive assessment of Jeffrey's rule

2010

Jeffrey (1983) proposed a generalisation of conditioning as a means of updating probability distributions when new evidence drives no event to certainty. His rule requires the stability of certain conditional probabilities through time. We tested this assumption (���invariance���) from the psychological point of view. In Experiment 1 participants offered probability estimates for events in Jeffrey's candlelight example.