UROP Project

Analyis of Naturalistic Arguments With Implicit Premises

Psychology, Cognition, Reasoning, Argument, Logic

Research Mentor: Dr. David Braithwaite,
Department, College, Affiliation: Psychology, Arts and Sciences
Contact Email: braithwaite@psy.fsu.edu
Research Assistant Supervisor (if different from mentor):
Research Assistant Supervisor Email:
Faculty Collaborators:
Faculty Collaborators Email:

Looking for Research Assistants: Yes
Number of Research Assistants: 2
Relevant Majors: Open to all majors, but these may be particularly well suited: Psychology, Philosophy, Computer Science, Linguistics
Project Location: On FSU Main Campus
Research Assistant Transportation Required: Yes
Remote or In-person: Partially Remote
Approximate Weekly Hours: 5-10, Flexible schedule (Combination of business and outside of business. TBD between student and research mentor.)
Roundtable Times and Zoom Link:
Not participating in the roundtable

Project Description

This study is part of a broader research program investigating reasoning and argument from a psychological perspective. The overarching goal is to understand how people evaluate arguments and what factors make an argument seem more or less compelling. The idea for this study was sparked by the observation that arguments in natural settings, unlike arguments in most psychology studies, are rarely fully explicit. Instead, they are "enthymemes" - that is, they rely on one or more unstated premises. This observation suggests several questions: What kinds of premises tend to be left implicit in naturalistic arguments, and why? How would an argument's logical validity, and its perceived persuasive strength, change if these implicit premises were made explicit? Answering these questions can shed light on how people construct and evaluate everyday arguments, and on why some arguments are more or less persuasive than their logical structure alone would imply.

To investigate these questions, this project will analyze arguments occurring in online forums such as Reddit's Change My View. The task of the research assistant(s) will be to build a database of naturalistic arguments, identify each argument's implicit premise(s), and analyze how making those premises explicit would affect the argument's validity and perceived strength. The methods used to do this will depend on the student's background and interests. For example, a psychology student might employ psychological content-coding methods; a philosophy student might focus on logical analysis of the arguments; and a computer science or AI student might focus on automated scraping and classification of arguments. The resulting database and analyses will be used to generate hypotheses for future psychological studies and to develop stimuli for those studies.

Research Tasks: The research assistant will identify and collect arguments from online forums (e.g., Reddit's Change My View), reconstruct each argument's premises and conclusion, identify the premise(s) left implicit, analyze how making the implicit premise(s) explicit would affect the argument's validity; and organize this work into a database. The research assistant(s) may focus more on one or another of these tasks depending on background and interests. Time permitting, the research assistant may also assist with review of relevant literature, and/or with developing tools to automate collection, analysis, and organization of arguments.

Skills that research assistant(s) may need: Required: Interest in reasoning and argument; careful reading and attention to detail; comfort working independently on open-ended analytical tasks; reliable organization and record-keeping (e.g., in a shared spreadsheet or document).

Recommended: Coursework in at least one of the following areas: cognitive psychology, logic/reasoning, critical thinking, coding relating to web scraping and/or text analysis, AI, or computational linguistics.