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Kleemeier, R.W. (1962). Intellectual changes in the based sample of very old adults. Psychology ulation. Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences,
senium. Proceedings of the American Statistical and Aging, 12, 309 313. 53A, M147 M154.
Association, 1, 290 295. Small, B.J., Herlitz, A., Fratiglioni, L., Almkvist, O., Van der Wal, E.A., & Sandman, C.A. (1992).
Maier, H., & Smith, J. (1999). Psychological predic- & B ckman, L. (1997). Cognitive predictors of Evidence for terminal decline in the event-
tors of mortality in old age. Journal of incident Alzheimer s disease: A prospective related potential of the brain. Electro-
Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 54B, P44 P54. longitudinal study. Neuropsychology, 11, encephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology,
Riegel, K.F., & Riegel, R.M. (1972). Development, 413 420. 83, 211 216.
drop and death. Developmental Psychology, 6, van Boxtel, M.P.J., Buntinx, F., Houx, P.J., White, N., & Cunningham, W.R. (1988). Is terminal
306 319. Metsemakers, J.F.M., Knottnerus, A., & Jolles, drop pervasive or specific? Journal of
Small, B.J., & B ckman, L. (1997). Cognitive corre- J. (1998). The relation between morbidity and Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 43,
lates of mortality: Evidence from a population- cognitive performance in a normal aging pop- P141 P144.
Fig. 1. The excerpts from Table 1 diagrammed using rules from Rips (1998).
strength of the arguers positions. tage in persuasiveness for items at Empirical evidence is generally
Quite a bit of research in social and the beginning of a serial list. thought to be the strongest form of
cognitive psychology has studied One potential explanation for justification because it ties the
the persuasiveness of individual the antiprimacy effect stems from claim to actual events. For exam-
pieces of evidence within other- the fact that the first claim in the ple, the justification in the first ar-
wise unstructured lists; many of conversation commands the remain- gument in Table 1 ( She indicated
these studies have tried to deter- ing claims in the argument s struc- to her mother. . . .And she can iden-
mine whether items at the begin- ture. (One node in a structure like tify her handwriting. ) is a simple
ning or the end of the list are more the ones in Fig. 1 is said to com- example of justification by empiri-
convincing in other words, mand a second if the node immedi- cal evidence. Evidence of this type
whether they display primacy or ately above the first is also above varies in strength, of course, and is
recency effects. But argumentative the second.) Whenever an arguer subject to dispute, as this example
structure in dialogues is more com- makes a claim, he or she takes on makes clear. One form of evidence
plex than a list and alters which the burden of defending it, in ac- is a correlation between a hypothe-
claims are crucial. cord with van Eemeren and sized cause and an effect. Such evi-
One source of evidence about Grootendorst s Principle 2. But the dence examines cases in which the
the effect of argument structure burden of the first claim extends proposed cause is present or absent
comes from a study (Bailenson, over the entire dialogue, whereas and determines whether the target
1997) in which participants read the burden of a later claim com- effect is present or absent in those
scripted conversations similar to mands a more limited domain. This instances. If there are many cases in
the one in Table 2. One group of puts the proponent of the first which both cause and effect are
participants read the arguments in claim at a disadvantage, other present or both are absent and few
the form shown in the table, and a things being equal.3 cases in which one is present and
second group read reversed argu- the other absent, then a strong cor-
ments in which we exchanged the relation links cause and effect.
positions of claims a and b, c and d, JUSTIFICATION There are many situations, how-
and e and f. All participants then ever, in which arguers will provide
judged which of the arguers had a justification by introducing a
the greater burden of proof ( had In addition to dialogue struc- plausible-sounding rationale (a
most to do at the end of the argu- ture, the content of individual just-so story ) rather than empiri-
ment to convince the other that he moves is obviously important. cal evidence. For example, one
or she was right ). The results One example of the importance of might contend that Nicole would
demonstrated an antiprimacy effect: content relates to justifications. As not have told her mother that she
The arguer who made the first we have just mentioned, when one was making notes in a book unless
claim (no matter which side of the arguer challenges the claim of an- she was. Such assertions alone are
argument he or she was on) in- other, the burden is on the second not conclusive, because they do not
curred more burden of proof than to supply a justification a reason provide appropriate comparisons:
the second arguer. This bias against why the claim is true. Justification It is unknown how often people tell
the first arguer seems to be an order can take a number of forms, and others they are taking notes when
effect occurring only in structured we discuss two that are of particu- they are not. Still, explanations are
dialogue, as most previous experi- lar interest to psychologists: em- important. A correlation between a
ments have not shown a disadvan- pirical evidence and explanation.4 hypothesized cause and an effect
does not establish a causal link be-
tween them. Explanations help fill
this gap by describing a plausible
Table 2. Example of an argument used in the study by Bailenson (1997)
mechanism that can connect the
a. PAT: Baseball has more breaks in the action than other sports. cause to the effect (Ahn, Kalish,
b. JIM: Baseball has fewer breaks in the action than other sports. Medin, & Gelman, 1995).
c. PAT: You have to sit through all of the side changes. The meaning of this form of jus-
d. JIM: The only long break comes after the seventh inning.
tification is subject to debate. Some
researchers argue that explanations
e. PAT: Every time they substitute pitchers there is another fifteen minute
break. are offered in error. According to
f. JIM: At least there are not many substitutions in baseball compared to
this account, people who give ex-
other sports. planations (especially narrative
just-so stories) when asked to
prove a claim are mistaking expla- high- and low-information condi- believe their position simply be-
nation for evidence (Kuhn, 1991). tions, participants gave explana- cause they have provided an expla-
An alternative view is that in such tions higher ratings in the low-in- nation, then this may not be a de-
situations people know that they formation condition, in which the sirable strategy. If, however,
are providing unsubstantiated ex- arguer had little to go on, than in explaining improves their under-
planations, but are doing so for the high-information condition. standing of the problem and makes
pragmatic reasons. For example, Thus, what counts as sufficient jus- clear what needs to be done to pro-
they may not have easy access to tification depends on the pragmat- vide empirical support, then the
data they could use to compute a ics of the situation. initial reliance on just-so stories
correlation. We (Brem & Rips, in People sometimes do offer ex- may be very useful.
press) have argued that people con- planations when they could have
struct narratives as justification offered evidence instead. The value
when evidence is scarce, but prefer of introducing unsubstantiated ex- DISCUSSION
evidence when data are at hand. In planations is unclear. The issue
one experiment, for example, we turns on what happens next in the
asked participants to write down arguing and the information-gath- When people listen to argumen-
their opinion on each of a set of top- ering process. If arguers begin to tative conversations, they keep
ical issues (e.g., why gun control
laws are ineffective), and we then
asked for justification of the opin-
ion in one of two ways. In one con-
dition, we asked, I f you were try-
ing to convince someone your view
is right, what evidence would you
give to try to show this? (cf. Kuhn,
1991). In a second condition, we
asked, I f you were trying to con-
vince someone else that your view
is right, what would be the ideal
evidence to show this? Imagine you
have access to any information or
techniques you require . Informing
participants that they could use
any information required increased
the percentage of opinions for
which they mentioned genuine ev-
idence from 32.5% to 63.9%.
Further support for the hypothe-
sis that pragmatic factors play a
role in the decision to use evidence
versus explanations comes from
participants evaluations of the ar-
guments of others (Brem & Rips, in
press). We led participants to be-
lieve that the arguer had either
very little data or a rich body of
data to draw upon. We then pre-
sented either explanation-based or
evidence-based support for a claim
and asked participants to rate the
strength of support (on a scale from Fig. 2. Mean ratings of strength of support given to explanations and evidence when
0 to 7, with 7 indicating highest arguers were said to have very little data (low-information condition) or a rich body
of data (high-information condition) to draw upon to justify their position. The rat-
support). The results appear in ing scale ranged from 0 to 7, with 0 representing lowest support and 7 representing
Figure 2. Although evidence-based highest support. Error bars indicate –1 standard error of the mean. Data from Brem
support fared equally well in the and Rips (in press).
track of the arguers underlying sion maker.5 Questions like these dence is unavailable, when the reliabil-
moves and the relations among set a new agenda for research on ity and validity of the evidence are un-
clear, or when statements are difficult
them. We have illustrated some of human reasoning. to understand or ambiguous. These al-
these moves in the diagrams of ternative justifications might involve
Figure 1: claims, challenges, justifi- Recommended Reading appeals to authority, to the credibility
cations, defeaters, and accepters. (or lack of credibility) of a source, or to
We have tried to show that the way Hamblin, C.L. (1970). (See References) the possible consequences of a belief or
Reichman-Adar, R. (1984). (See act, to mention a few examples. This is
these conversational moves fit to-
References) the traditional domain of rhetoric and
gether affects how people evaluate Rips, L.J. (1998). (See References) social psychology.
the arguers burden of proof. In ad- van Eemeren, F.H., Grootendorst, R., 5. See, for example, Shafir,
dition, examining the different & Henkemans, F.S. (1996). Simonson, and Tversky (1993) on the
types of moves helps reveal the Fundamentals of argumentation role of reasoning pro and con in deci-
theory: A handbook of historical sion making.
strategies arguers have available.
backgrounds and contemporary
Arguers can trade off different developments. Mahwah, NJ:
forms of justification, relying on References
Erlbaum.
empirical evidence when they are Ahn, W.-K., Kalish, C.W., Medin, D.L., & Gelman,
lucky enough to have it and on S.A. (1995). The role of covariation versus
Acknowledgments National Science mechanism in causal attribution. Cognition, 54,
plausible explanations when they Foundation Grant SBR-9514491 sup- 299 352.
are not. ported the preparation of this article and Bailenson, J. (1997). Claim strength and burden of
much of the research summarized here. proof. In Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the
This initial theory, however, rais- Cognitive Science Society (pp. 13 18). Mahwah,
es a large number of questions NJ: Erlbaum.
Baron, J. (1995). Myside bias in thinking about
about people s understanding of Notes abortion. Thinking and Reasoning, 1, 221 235.
argumentation. For one thing, our Brem, S.K., & Rips, L.J. (in press). Explanation and
evidence in informal argument. Cognitive
examination of justifications sug- 1. Address correspondence to Lance Science.
gests it may be fruitful to look at Rips, Psychology Department, North- CNN. (1997). Special section: Simpson civil trial [On-
western University, 2029 Sheridan Rd., line]. Available: http://cnn.com/US/OJ/
varieties of other argumentative simpson.civil.trial
moves. For example, one can ask Evanston, IL 60208; e-mail: rips@nwu. Eisenberg, A.R., & Garvey, C. (1981). Children s
edu. use of verbal strategies in resolving conflicts.
whether people distinguish types 2. Earlier formal theories of argu- Discourse Processes, 4, 149 170.
of challenges or types of conces- mentative dialogues centered on the Hamblin, C.L. (1970). Fallacies. London: Methuen.
Hare, D. (1997). Amy s view. London: Faber &
sions and what conditions trigger idea of a game in which individual ar- Faber.
the use of each type (see Rips, 1998, guers take turns making assertions, Kuhn, D. (1991). The skills of argument. Cambridge,
for a study of types of defeaters). concessions, challenges, and other England: Cambridge University Press.
moves. This analysis produced impor- Perkins, D.N., Farady, M., & Bushey, B. (1991).
These choices may sometimes de- tant insights, especially about the ar- Everyday reasoning and the roots of intelli-
gence. In J.F. Voss, D.N. Perkins, & J.W. Segal
pend on the social bonds between guers commitment to the assertions (Eds.), Informal reasoning and education (pp.
arguers, but the exact connection (e.g., Hamblin, 1970). But the game 83 105). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
framework also tends to obscure the Pollock, J. (1989). How to build a person. Cambridge,
with social factors remains to be ex- MA: MIT Press.
plored. It is also reasonable to ask embedded character of the arguers Reichman-Adar, R. (1984). Extended person-
moves (see Rips, 1998, for discussion). machine interface. Artificial Intelligence, 22,
whether the theory embodied in 3. Of course, an arguer s burden 157 218.
Figure 1 can illuminate classical also depends on other factors, includ- Rips, L.J. (1998). Reasoning and conversation.
Psychological Review, 105, 411 441.
difficulties in reasoning, such as ing the plausibility of his or her indi- Shafir, E., Simonson, I., & Tversky, A. (1993).
question begging and similar falla- vidual assertions and willingness to Reason-based choice. Cognition, 49, 11 36.
cies, and whether two-person argu- make concessions. These factors might van Eemeren, F.H., & Grootendorst, R. (1992).
outweigh or shift the burden during Argumentation, communication, and fallacies.
ments such as the ones we have the course of the dialogue. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Voss, J.F., & Means, M.L. (1991). Learning to reason
discussed can shed light on inter- 4. Arguers may rely on other types via instruction in argumentation. Learning and
nal deliberation by a single deci- of justification when empirical evi- Instruction, 1, 337 350.