Geoffrey P. Goodwin

Reasoning about relations.

Inferences about spatial, temporal, and other relations are ubiquitous. This article presents a novel model-based theory of such reasoning. The theory depends on 5 principles. (a) The structure of mental models is iconic as far as possible. (b) The logical consequences of relations emerge from models constructed from the meanings of the relations and from knowledge. (c) Individuals tend to construct only a single, typical model. (d) They spontaneously develop their own strategies for relational reasoning. (e) Regardless of strategy, the difficulty of an inference depends on the process of integration of the information from separate premises, the number of entities that have to be integrated to form a model, and the depth of the relation. The article describes computer implementations of the theory and presents experimental results corroborating its main principle.

Preferences for Enhancement Pharmaceuticals: The Reluctance to Enhance Fundamental Traits

Four studies examined the willingness of young, healthy individuals to take drugs intended to enhance their own social, emotional, and cognitive traits. We found that people were much more reluctant to enhance traits believed to be more fundamental to self-identity (e.g., social comfort) than traits considered less fundamental to self-identity (e.g., concentration ability). Moral acceptability of a trait enhancement strongly predicted peoples desire to legalize the enhancement but not their willingness to take the enhancement. Ad taglines that framed enhancements as enabling rather than enhancing the fundamental self increased peoples interest in a fundamental trait enhancement and eliminated the preference for less fundamental over more fundamental trait enhancements. (c) 2008 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

Does Incidental Disgust Amplify Moral Judgment? A Meta-Analytic Review of Experimental Evidence.

The role of emotion in moral judgment is currently a topic of much debate in moral psychology. One specific claim made by many researchers is that irrelevant feelings of disgust can amplify the severity of moral condemnation. Numerous researchers have found this effect, but there have also been several published failures to replicate it. Clarifying this issue would inform important theoretical debates among rival accounts of moral judgment. We meta-analyzed all available studies—published and unpublished—in which incidental disgust was manipulated prior to or concurrent with a moral judgment task (k = 50). We found evidence for a small amplification effect of disgust (d = 0.11), which is strongest for gustatory/olfactory modes of disgust induction. However, there is also some suggestion of publication bias in this literature, and when this is accounted for, the effect disappears entirely (d = −0.01). Moreover, prevalent confounds mean that the effect size that we estimate is best interpreted as an upper bound on the size of the amplification effect. On the basis of the results of this meta-analysis, we argue against strong claims about the causal role of affect in moral judgment and suggest a need for new, more rigorous research on this topic.

Logic, probability, and human reasoning

This review addresses the long-standing puzzle of how logic and probability fit together in human reasoning. Many cognitive scientists argue that conventional logic cannot underlie deductions, because it never requires valid conclusions to be withdrawn - not even if they are false; it treats conditional assertions implausibly; and it yields many vapid, although valid, conclusions. A new paradigm of probability logic allows conclusions to be withdrawn and treats conditionals more plausibly, although it does not address the problem of vapidity. The theory of mental models solves all of these problems. It explains how people reason about probabilities and postulates that the machinery for reasoning is itself probabilistic. Recent investigations accordingly suggest a way to integrate probability and deduction.

Moral Character in Person Perception

Understanding how people form impressions of others is a key goal of social cognition research. Past theories have posited that two fundamental dimensions—warmth and competence—underlie impression formation. However, these models conflate morality with warmth and fail to capture the full role that moral character plays in impression formation. An emerging perspective separates moral character (or morality) from warmth on both theoretical and empirical grounds. When morality is pitted against warmth, morality is clearly a more important driver of impression formation, as revealed by correlational, experimental, and archival studies. Yet social warmth remains important and conveys distinct information that morality does not. Alongside competence, both factors matter not only for person perception but also for other aspects of social cognition, including group perception. Important unanswered questions remain regarding the perceived structure of moral character and the way it is appraised in everyday life.

Easy on the mind, easy on the wrongdoer: Discrepantly fluent violations are deemed less morally wrong

The present experiment tested the hypothesis that discrepancies in processing fluency influence the perceived wrongness of moral violations. Participants were presented with numerous moral violations in easy or difficult to read font. For some violations experienced perceptual fluency was consistent with the fluency associated with previous violations, whereas for others it was more fluent or more disfluent. Results show that, across multiple vignettes, participants rated moral violations that were processed with discrepant fluency as less morally wrong than those processed with discrepant disfluency. The current work highlights the importance of metacognitive experiences in moral judgment and contributes to the emerging literature on the role of experiential factors in moral judgment.

The psychological puzzle of Sudoku

Sudoku puzzles, which are popular worldwide, require individuals to infer the missing digits in a 9 × 9 array according to the general rule that every digit from 1 to 9 must occur once in each row, in each column, and in each of the 3-by-3 boxes in the array. We present a theory of how individuals solve these puzzles. It postulates that they rely solely on pure deductions, and that they spontaneously acquire various deductive tactics, which differ in their difficulty depending on their “relational complexity”, i.e., the number of constraints on which they depend. A major strategic shift is necessary to acquire tactics for more difficult puzzles: solvers have to keep track of possible digits in a cell. We report three experiments corroborating this theory. We also discuss their implications for theories of reasoning that downplay the role of deduction in everyday reasoning.

Mental models of Boolean concepts

Negation, conjunction, and disjunction are major building blocks in the formation of concepts. This article presents a new model-based theory of these Boolean components. It predicts that individuals simplify the models of instances of concepts. Evidence corroborates the theory and challenges alternative accounts, such as those based on minimal descriptions, algebraic complexity, or structural invariance. A computer program implementing the theory yields more accurate predictions than these rival accounts. Two experiments showed that the numbers of models of a Boolean concept predict the difficulty of formulating a description of it. As mental models may also underlie deductive reasoning, the present theory integrates two hitherto separate areas of investigation.

When It’s Bad to Be Friendly and Smart The Desirability of Sociability and Competence Depends on Morality

Morality, sociability, and competence are distinct dimensions in person perception. We argue that a person’s morality informs us about their likely intentions, whereas their competence and sociability inform us about the likelihood that they will fulfill those intentions. Accordingly, we hypothesized that whereas morality would be considered unconditionally positive, sociability and competence would be highly positive only in moral others, and would be less positive in immoral others. Using exploratory factor analyses, Studies 1a and 1b distinguished evaluations of morality and sociability. Studies 2 to 5 then showed that sociability and competence are evaluated positively contingent on morality—Study 2 demonstrated this phenomenon, while the remaining studies explained it (Study 3), generalized it (Studies 3-5), and ruled out an alternative explanation for it (Study 5). Study 6 showed that the positivity of morality traits is independent of other morality traits. These results support a functionalist account of these dimensions of person perception.

Reasoning about the relations between relations

Relations can hold between relations, as in assertions such as: Cordelia loves Lear more than Goneril does. Naïve reasoners can make inferences that depend on these higher order relations, which are vital for science and mathematics, but no existing theory explains such inferences. The present paper presents a theory based on mental models of the situations under description, and it reports four experiments corroborating the theory. Experiment 1a showed that the difficulty of such inferences from two premises depends on the integration of the information from the premises into a single model. The same result held in Experiment 1b, even when individuals were not permitted to make written workings. Experiment 2 required the participants to think aloud, and their protocols revealed that they developed three main strategies. Experiment 3 biased the development of these strategies, showing that individuals assemble them “bottom up” from various tactical steps.