Cognitive Dissonance Model of Conditional Reasoning based on Truth-making

Conditional reasoning (If A, Then B) is a lasting topic in the psychology of reasoning. The experimental paradigm for conditional reasoning is a card selection task using logical rules. Although the models of conditional reasoning have achieved great success, there are still puzzles about the training effect (logical training doesn’t improve the correct rate for the tasks in people without formal logic background). For example, ordinary people feel confused with the truth table which is the valid formal rule for conditional reasoning after they have been trained for this rule by logicians. Our work contributes these conflicts to the disposition that ordinary people have, that is, truth-making, a process of making every proposition or judgement true or grounded. Most people may perform better in selection tasks in the pre-test (not training) of the card selection task. This paper tries to solve these puzzles with the cognitive dissonance theory by combing them with the truth-maker theory by proposing that conditional reasoning is a continuous truth-seeking process. We then conducted pre-test and post-test and compared the confidence of their own reasoning in two selection tasks, and the purpose is to examine how the truth-makings of people affect conditional reasoning. Experimental results showed that truth-making is an important factor that governs people’s ordinary reasoning processes.