Les normes du raisonnement : entre inné et acquis

Abstract

This paper shows the results of a quantitative study which tests the correlation between levels of educational attainment and the resistance to cognitive errors. Do diplomas protect us against inferential mistakes? Do they increase our consciousness of the type of reasoning we use implicitly? Does the type of diploma we have affect these factors? The questions are important as they allow us to challenge the naturalist understanding of cognitive bias generally accepted by orthodox theories of the psychology of error. The results obtained by this study of 1559 people are not conclusive and their interpretations should be subject to caution, but they throw doubt on explanations with a strong naturalist or culturalist bias.