Research in the field of human reasoning has shown repeatedly that people find it reasonably easy to detect inconsistencies. The question that still remains is how people revise their beliefs to undo these inconsistencies. Past research on belief revision has mainly focused on trying to identify a single belief revision strategy. The main goal of this thesis was to investigate whether people apply one single belief revision strategy or rather multiple ones. This thesis reports on seven experiments on belief revision investigated within the arena of human reasoning theories. In each experiment, participants had to make belief revision choices on modus ponens (MP) and modus tollens (MT) problems. Each inference problem consisted of sets of three inconsistent statements. The truth of the first two statements was not certain and the last statement, that caused an inconsistency, was a fact. The participants task was to indicate belief preference in the first or second statement to gain consistency. Their belief preference and their decision time were measured. The focus laid on investigating whether people revise their beliefs as a function of mental models or content and context factors. This captures a contrast between a more global logic-based reasoning process and a more specific psychological-based reasoning process. The use of the two different inference types made it possible to test a possible involvement of mental models. A possible role of content and context in human belief revision was examined by manipulating the content factors probability (Experiments I, II, and II), familiarity (Experiment III), and the context factors task instruction (Experiment IV) and source trustworthiness (Experiments V, VI, VII). The results showed that two main belief revision strategies exist, one based on mental models and one based on probability. Furthermore, both the belief revision choices and the decision time results revealed that the two strategies are not independent of each other, but either facilitate or hamper the process of belief revision depending on whether they run parallel or guide a person s mind in different directions. Thus, there exist mutually exclusive belief revision strategies affecting the belief revision process simultaneously and each in their own way.
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