Abstract
Twentieth-century psychologists have been pessimistic about teaching
reasoning, prevailing opinion suggesting that people may possess
only domain-specific rules, rather than abstract rules; this would
mean that training a rule in one domain would not produce generalization
to other domains. Alternatively, it was thought that people might
possess abstract rules (such as logical ones) but that these are
induced developmentally through self-discovery methods and cannot
be trained. Research suggests a much more optimistic view: even brief
formal training in inferential rules may enhance their use for reasoning
about everyday life events. Previous theorists may have been mistaken
about trainability, in part because they misidentified the kind of
rules that people use naturally.
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