Conservatism in belief revision and participant skepticism
Corner, A. and Harris, A.J.L. and Hahn, Ulrike (2010) Conservatism in belief revision and participant skepticism. In: Ohlsson, S. and Catrambone, R. (eds.) Cognition in Flux: Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, Texas, USA: Cognitive Science Society. ISBN 9780976831860.
Abstract
Comparing the responses of participants in reasoning experiments to the normative standard of Bayes’ Theorem has been a popular empirical approach for almost half a century. One longstanding finding is that people’s belief revision is conservative with respect to the normative prescriptions of Bayes’ Theorem, that is, beliefs are revised less than they should be. In this paper, we consider a novel explanation of conservatism, namely that participants do not perceive information provided to them in experiments as coming from a fully reliable source. From the Bayesian perspective, less reliable evidence should lead to more conservative belief revision. Thus, there may be less of discrepancy between normative predictions and behavioural data than previously assumed.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Book Section |
|---|---|
| Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | belief revision, conservatism, Bayesian, experimental pragmatics |
| School: | School of Science > Psychological Sciences |
| Research Centres and Institutes: | Birkbeck Knowledge Lab |
| Depositing User: | Sarah Hall |
| Date Deposited: | 02 Jun 2015 13:26 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Dec 2016 13:39 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/12311 |
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