@inproceedings{deans-browneDifferentialMemoryBeliefCongruent2025b,

title = {Differential Memory for Belief-Congruent versus Belief-Incongruent Arguments Cannot Explain Belief-Driven Argument Evaluation},

author = {Calvin Christopher James Lee Deans-Browne and Pia Roth and Carolin Echterbeck and Henrik Singmann},

url = {https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5nn3w7xz, CogSci Proceedings link},

year  = {2025},

date = {2025-07-27},

urldate = {2025-01-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society},

volume = {47},

abstract = {People often rely more on their prior beliefs than the presented evidence when evaluating arguments. We investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying this phenomenon. We hypothesise that when individuals encounter an argument that is congruent with their beliefs, it activates related information in memory. For belief-congruent arguments, people should therefore be more likely to both correctly recognise previously encountered information and incorrectly recognise new information as previously seen. To test this, we first investigated the effect of participants' beliefs about political claims on their evaluation of corresponding arguments that varied in quality. We then employed a surprise memory test to assess participants' recognition memory for these arguments. While we replicated the finding that prior beliefs drive argument evaluations, prior beliefs did not affect memory performance for all arguments in the same way. Our results indicate that individuals may use prior beliefs to aid memory only when the memory task is difficult.},

keywords = {Belief bias, Belief-based reasoning, Everyday reasoning, Informal reasoning, real-world reasoning, Reasoning, Recognition memory},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{deans-browneInconsistentArgumentsAre2024,

title = {Inconsistent Arguments Are Perceived as Better Than Appeals to Authority: An Extension of the Everyday Belief Bias},

author = {Calvin Deans-Browne and Alexandra Băitanu and Yuliya Dubinska and Henrik Singmann},

editor = {Larissa K Samuelson and Stefan Frank and Mariya Toneva and Allyson P. Mackey and Eliot Hazeltine},

url = {http://singmann.org/download/publications/Deans-Browne%20et%20al.%20-%202024%20-%20Inconsistent%20Arguments%20are%20Perceived%20as%20Better%20Tha.pdf, final PDF

https://osf.io/j2xn3, OSF link},

doi = {10.31234/osf.io/j2xn3},

year  = {2024},

date = {2024-07-24},

urldate = {2025-01-15},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the 46th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society},

abstract = {Social media is often used as a platform where individuals engage in debate regarding topics that are important to them. Not all arguments are equally convincing, and whilst a given argument may be persuasive to some people, it is often seen as inadequate by others. We are interested in both the individual and argument level differences that make ‘everyday’ arguments such as those on social media persuasive. In a replication of our Everyday Belief Bias Task (Deans-Browne & Singmann, 2024), we investigate this question using a paradigm that consists of two parts. In the first part, we measure participant’s individual beliefs about eight claims each referring to a political topic (e.g., Abortion should be legal). In the second part, participants rated an argument for each of these claims that was deemed as either good, inconsistent (containing internal inconsistencies), or authority-based (being centered around appeals to authority). We replicated the belief consistency effect – participants preferred arguments that were also in line with their beliefs. We also found that authority-based arguments were rated as worse than inconsistent arguments, and that both types of arguments were rated as worse than good arguments. The implications are first that people do not evaluate arguments independently of the background beliefs held about them. Secondly, people are willing to ignore inconsistencies in arguments more than they are willing to accept the endorsement of authority figures as adequate evidence for arguments.},

keywords = {Belief bias, real-world reasoning, Reasoning},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}