An Experimental Study On Disjunctive Reasoning Under Uncertainty Of The College Students

As one kind of compound reasoning, disjunctive reasoning has been full researched by the domestic researchers, but the related study on disjunctive reasoning under uncertainty is not so rich. Therefore, it is worthy of research.In this article, there were four experiments designed to study the characteristics and influencing factors in the solution of the college students to disjunctive reasoning problems under uncertainty. The first study principally principally explored whether there existed a characteristic of domain generality in disjunctive reasoning and some influencing factors.To be further, the second study explored the disjunctive effect on college students in the solution of disjunctive reasoning problems. A "tossing a com game" context was provided to the college students in which there were three conditions: Winning condition ( won $200 after the first tossing ); Losing condition ( lost $100 after the first tossing ) and Uncertain condition ( knew nothing about the result of the first tossing ). Then, in order to testify the two tendencies that were bought forward by Shafir, the second experiment was modified into two new ones. The aim of modified experiment III was to testify whether a general tendency to reject the gamble in the disjunctive condition was true, while experiment IV testified whether a tendency to seek useless information that reduces uncertainty was true.The four studies sampled college students from Psychology School of Southwest Normal University as subjects. Then, the article came to the conclusion as follows:(1) The general level of the subjects' performance on 9 disjunctive reasoningtasks under uncertainty was low. The correct rate was under 50%, less than half of the subjects could finish the reasoning tasks correctly.(2) The difficulty of disjunctive reasoning under uncertainty did not lie in the lack of the cognitive ability of complex computation, but it had high relations with the thinking styles (including cognitive need and cognitive style).(3) There existed disjunctive effect on the college students in the process of disjunctive reasoning under uncertainty. Experiment III defied the general tendency to reject the gamble in the disjunctive condition., however, experiment IV supported the viewpoint of a tendency to seek useless information that reduces uncertainty.