Decision Making in Problems Utilizing Inductive and Deductive Inference

Abstract

The performance of human operators in a problem-solving situation calling for both inductive and deductive inference was investigated experimentally. The subjects were required to find a common solution to several logical statements whose structure was completely unknown to them. The subjects were required to keep a written record but otherwise the data available at any stage was incomplete. The experimental evidence shows that human operators did better than would be expected on the basis of objective deduction only and that this gain in performance was related to a general measure of redundancy in the problems.