BELIEF BIAS IN CHILDRENS REASONING

An experiment is reported in which children of two age groups (first a nd fourth year juniors) were given a deductive reasoning task in which the believability of conclusions was manipulated. The children were g iven two premises with a conclusion and asked whether or not the concl usion followed. Children of both age groups showed that their tendency to accept the conclusions was a clear and significant function of bot h (a) the nature of the premises, and (b) the believability of the con clusion. They demonstrated both a positive and a negative belief bias effect, by accepting significantly more believable than neutral conclu sions and by accepting significantly more neutral than unbelievable co nclusions. Older children showed significantly more premise based reas oning and significantly less belief bias. The results are discussed wi th reference to contemporary theories of the belief bias effect in rea soning.