Development and Application of a Model of Individual Decision Making in MilitaryContexts

摘要

Most of the preceding research deals with arguments in which the predicates arefamiliar enough to reason about. Some of our work during the past year also dealt with category-based arguments in which the predicates were unfamiliar and unlikely to enter the reasoning process, predicates like has sesamoid bones. In Lopez's dissertation he showed that phenomena that have previously been found only in a judgment task also obtained in a task that required subjects to partially generate the category-based arguments. In other work, we showed that some of the standard phenomena obtained with unfamiliar predicates also obtain in cultures that are very removed from Western Influences (only the American end of the research was in any way supported by this grant). All in all, our research documents the importance of similarity and plausibility computations in reasoning, and suggests that these computations are very natural ones.