Preliminaries to a psychology of inference

This paper presents a general pretheoretical framework for the study of inference. The framework is that of Social Judgment Theory which has been developed from Brunswik's probabilistic functionalism. The first section discusses the fundamental theoretical ideas and methodological principles. Important among these is the stress on the need to study the relation between the cognitive system and the inference task using parallel concepts for describing the cognitive system and the task, the theory of cognitive tasks, and the methodology of formal representative sampling. The second section describes a series of experimental paradigms developed from the basic ideas discussed in the first section. The third, and final section gives some examples of actual empirical research, mainly research concerned with the hypothesis testing process by means of which subjects learn inference tasks, studies on cognitive skills in using various rules for making inferences, new conceptions of feedback, research on the effects of feedforward, and interpersonal learning.