THE EFFECT OF SELF-REFERENT MATERIAL ON THE REASONING OF PEOPLE WITH DELUSIONS

People with delusions have been shown to have both generalized (Hug, G arety & Hemsley, 1988) and content-specific biases in reasoning (Benta ll, 1994). Our concern here was whether the hastiness that has been fo und when people with delusions reason on relatively abstract tasks wou ld be present on a more realistic task. A second concern was whether r easoning with salient or emotional material would increase the hastine ss bias in people with delusions. Two versions of a probabilistic reas oning task were used to study the data gathering of people with delusi ons. The first version employed realistic but emotionally neutral mate rial. People with delusions requested less evidence before making a de cision than psychiatric and normal comparison groups. Therefore, the h astiness found previously with abstract materials was seen to generali ze to a more realistic task. In the second version participants were r equired to reason with material that had an emotional content and may have been regarded as being personally meaningful. In this condition a ll groups reduced the amount of evidence requested before making a dec ision.