Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Although many studies have shown that being exposed toempirical data that contradict one’s beliefs can lead to learning,it is not clear whether calling attention to inconsistenciesamong beliefs without the provision of new data, leads tolearning. The present study asked whether calling attention toinconsistent beliefs via thought experiments leads to beliefrevision. Five-hundred-seventy-five participants were assignedto three different conditions in a pre-training, training, post-training design. The results showed that participants generatedinconsistent beliefs between pre-training and training, but theydid not spontaneously revise them at post-training (BaselineCondition). They did revise them, however, when they wereasked to reason about the implications of the training thoughtexperiments (Warning Condition) and when they saw anexplicit inference drawn from the training thought experiments(Explicit Inference Condition). These results show that, withprompting, scientifically naïve adults can learn from thoughtexperiments.