CogSci 2025

•

August 01, 2025

•

San Francisco, United States

keywords:

concepts and categories

psychology

reasoning

In this exploratory investigation, the basic paradigm manipulated diversity of contrasting evidence on inductive inferences drawn from a multi-item target. In prior research, it was shown that increasing the diversity of a contrast set led to lower generalization of a novel property that was probabilistically associated with the target (Bosch, 2020). In the present work, a significant majority of participants generated naïve theories or rules, e.g., “the bananas that cost points were fresher,” to explain probabilistic outcomes, e.g., four out of six exemplars of bananas cost ten points (while the other two cost zero points) in a mock online game. This effect did not depend on accuracy or predictive power of the proffered explanation. Further, preliminary evidence suggests that greater diversity of the contrast set is associated with a greater likelihood to generate explanations. Implications for inductive reasoning, naïve theories, and causal inference are discussed.

Downloads

Paper

Next from CogSci 2025

Idiosyncratic but not opaque: Linguistic conventions formed in reference games are interpretable by naïve humans and vision–language models
poster

Idiosyncratic but not opaque: Linguistic conventions formed in reference games are interpretable by naïve humans and vision–language models

CogSci 2025

Veronica Boyce
Ben Prystawski
+1
Veronica Boyce and 3 other authors

01 August 2025

Similar lecture

Generating Diverse Hypotheses for Inductive Reasoning
technical paper

Generating Diverse Hypotheses for Inductive Reasoning

NAACL 2025

Kyomin Jung
+3
Kang-il Lee and 5 other authors

30 April 2025