The Impact Of The Number Of Premises And Negative Evidence On Category-based Inductive Reasoning In The Different Obsessive-compulsive Tendency Individuals

Category-based inductive reasoning is one of the most basic human thinking activities,and its related research has three shortages.Firstly,there are few studies on negative evidence and these studies are all derived from abroad.However,whether the results in different cultural contexts are consistent is worth discussing.Secondly,there are two views on the role of negative evidence.One view is that providing negative evidence will increase the argument strength,and another view that providing negative evidence will weaken the argument strength.Heussen et al.’s study suggests that the effect of negative evidence may be related to the generic affiliations between the kind of negative evidence and the other premises or conclusions.However,this study directly adds different types of negative evidence on single premise,without considering the effect of the number of premises.Finally,few studies have considered the effect of cognitive control,attention bias,desire to control and perfectionist on argument strength,but the high obsessive-compulsive tendency individuals with above cognitive characteristics are indeed different from other individuals in category-based inductive reasoning.This study examines the impact of the number of premises on category-based inductive reasoning under the negative evidence of different generic affiliations(there are two types of negative evidence,one kind of negative evidence belong to the same sub-category as other premises or conclusions,another kind of negative evidence and the other premises or conclusions do not belong to one sub-category).At the same time,the obsessive-compulsive tendency were included in this study,and the characteristics of different obsessive-compulsive tendency individuals in category-based inductive reasoning summarized in the situations of different types of negative evidence and different premises.A total of 224 college students from a university in Hunan Province were selected as participants.The Yale-Brown obsessive-compulsive Scale was used to screen participants with high obsessive-compulsive tendency and low obsessive-compulsive tendency.Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 were mixed factorial design,the obsessive-compulsive tendency was between-subject variable;the number of premises and negative evidence were within-subject variable.The dependent variable was the argument strength.The difference between Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 was that the category involved in the negative evidence in Experiment 1 belongs to the same sub-category as other premises or conclusions,whereas the category covered in the negative evidence in Experiment 2 belongs to different sub-category with other premises or conclusions.The results indicated:(1)Obsessive-compulsive tendency would affect the argument strength in category-based inductive reasoning,and the argument strength of the individuals with higher obsessive-compulsive tendency was lower than that of the less obsessive-compulsive tendency.(2)The number of premises would affect the argument strength in category-based inductive reasoning,the argument strength of single premise is lower than that of double premise.(3)Negative evidence would affect the argument strength in category-based inductive reasoning,However,negative evidence has different effects under different conditions.When negative evidence belong to the same sub-category as other premises or conclusions,it has reduced the power of argument strength,And the effect of negative evidence is more obvious in the category-based inductive reasoning of high obsessive-compulsive tendency individuals than low obsessive-compulsive tendency individuals.However When negative evidence and the other other premises or conclusions do not belong to one sub-category,it has improved the power of argument strength,And the effect of negative evidence is not obvious enough in the category-based inductive reasoning of high obsessive-compulsive tendency individuals than low obsessive-compulsive tendency individuals.(4)The expressions of different obsessive-compulsive tendency individuals in category-based inductive reasoning with different genus relationship negative evidence can be used as a new diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder.