[simonh]

Thanks for the considered response, it was a good read. As you say we're not that far apart really.

I agree the studies are very narrow, but that's really a requirement, in a study like this you have to narrow things down very tightly to eliminate extraneous factors. I know it's hard to believe now, but these findings in the 70s really were shocking, many psychologists and philosophers thought the results were impossible. I think it's hard for people nowadays to put themselves back into that context.

On the reasoning problem, I don't think it's fair to include the people that spotted the trick in the final analysis. The fact that 60% of people that didn't know they were contradicting themselves did so perfectly happily just in order to feel consistent despite evidence to the contrary is pretty shocking.

Anyway, thanks for the discussion.

[rbecker]

> I know it's hard to believe now, but these findings in the 70s really were shocking, many psychologists and philosophers thought the results were impossible.

I completely forgot to consider that/am only vaguely familiar with the beliefs at the time. It casts the experimenters in a completely different light, and makes me think I should not have been so negative of them. They must have tried many different increasingly sophisticated setups before they were able to tease out these effects, that they only suspected existed. It's always fascinating to see someone intuit some truth long before they have experimental data to confirm it. I imagine reading about their early failures and how they slowly arrived at their findings would be very interesting.