Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Even if after If then conditionals

2013; Wiley; Volume: 35; Issue: 35 Linguagem: Inglês

1551-6709

José Antonio Ruiz-Ballesteros, Sergio Moreno‐Ríos,

Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies

Even if after If then conditionals Jose Antonio Ruiz-Ballesteros (qframe@correo.ugr.es ) Facultad de Psicologia. Universidad de Granada. Campus de Cartuja S/N. Granada 18071 (Spain) Sergio Moreno-Rios (semoreno@ugr.es) Facultad de Psicologia. Universidad de Granada. Campus de Cartuja S/N. Granada 18071 (Spain) Abstract This study evaluates how people represent “even if” conditionals when they have to integrate them with previous “if then” conditionals and also make an inference. The terms in the premises were ordered to facilitate their integration (Figure 1: If A then B; Even if B C). In half the cases, the “even if” conditional was expressed with a negation instead of an affirmation (If A then B; Even if not B C). Participants had to infer what followed, given A or C. Previous results showed that in comprehension tasks, where information had to be integrated, counterfactual conditionals seemed to be represented with just one situation (B and C). By contrast, when people had to make inferences with these conditionals, they seemed to represent two situations. In any case, counterfactual seem to be represented with two situations (B and C, and not B and C). In our task, people had to do both: to infer and to integrate. Results showed that the use of negations and the direction in the inference had an effect on the endorsed inferences, but the two factors did not interact. The need to integrate premises did not block access to the two “even if” situations in an inference task. Keywords: semifactual conditionals; directionality; mental models. Introduction Some previous results have shown that when people make inferences with a semifactual conditional, they represent two mental models. For example, the conditional “Even if it had been raining she would have gone to the party”: people seem to represent the factual case “It was not raining and she went to the party” and the hypothetical case “It was raining and she went to the party” (see Moreno-Rios, Garcia-Madruga & Byrne, 2008). Semifactual conditionals are similar to counterfactual conditionals, but with different initial representations: given “If A had been the case then B would have been the case” people think about two possibilities from the outset, noting one as the ‘facts’ (not-A and not-B) and the other as ‘imagined’ (A and B) possibilities (Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 2002). Forinstance, if we take the above example: If it had been sunny then she would have gone to the party we see that this sentence suggests, on the one hand, the representation that really It was not sunny and she did not go to the party and, on the other hand, the possibility that It was sunny and she went to the party . Results with reasoning tasks are consistent with the two initial representations proposed. However, priming studies (Santamaria, Espino & Byrne, 2005) evidenced that when people read an “even if A B” semifactual, they are primed to read a subsequent ‘not-A and B’ conjunction more quickly than when they have read a factual “if A then B” conditional, whereas they read ‘A and B’ just as quickly after reading the semifactual as after the factual conditional. Unexpectedly, these authors found that “if” counterfactuals did not prime the ‘not-A and not-B’ possibility more than “even if” semifactuals. That happened only with counterfactual conditionals and not with semifactual conditionals (see also, Gomez-Veiga, Garcia- Madruga & Moreno-Rios, 2010). Gomez-Veiga et al. (2010) proposed that it is possible that the comprehension tasks lead to a less exhaustive representation than inference tasks with only one part of the information. One possible cause is that in the comprehension task, the conditional information must be integrated with the information given previously. That is, the comprehension task could induce a simpler strategy to avoid the working memory load using just one of the two mental models. In the present study, we use an inference task with a semifactual “even if” conditional preceded by a related “if then” conditional. We study how people make inferences integrating the information given by the premises. We chose the simplest way of ordering the terms in the premises: Figure 1 (If A then B; Even if B C). Figure 1 has been shown to be the easiest configuration of terms in premises to facilitate integration with conditional premises (e.g., Bara, Bucciarelli & Johnson-Laird, 1995). Also, we include sentences with a negation in the first term of the “even if” conditional. If people represent only the terms, the integration is not possible in this condition. For example, consider “If the sky was overcast it was raining” (If A then B), “Even if it had not been raining she would have gone to the party” (Even if not B C). People can consider the simple situation of “not raining” mentioned in the “even if” conditional, or they can also think of the actual situation: “It was raining and she went to the party”. Different responses are expected depending on whether people manage to consider all the representations derived from the “if then” and “even if” conditionals (see Table 1, Complete representation) or just a set of possible situations (some mental models), as assumed by the mental model theory (see Table 1, Initial representation). Some studies on the integration of premises with different relational statements in deduction (e.g., Oberauer, Hornig, Weidenfeld & Wilhelm, 2005; Oberauer & Wilhelm, 2000)