推理思考情境與個人思維傾向對大學生社會性科學議題文本的閱讀歷程與推理品質之影響

Socioscientific issues concern the positive and negative influence of the development of science and technology on real life. People should consider the supporting and opposing arguments and evidence, compare and evaluate them in order to make informed decision. However, people tend to prefer myside information (the so-called myside bias). In order to reduce myside bias, university students were asked to "role-play other-side people" or "empathize other-side people and integrate both positions." They were instructed to read texts presenting both supporting and opposing information concerning using nuclear power in Taiwan under one of the reasoning contexts mentioned above. After reading, they were asked to evaluate the convincingness of arguments in texts and express their opinions through informal reasoning questionnaire. Before reading, they filled in "The Inventory of Critical-thinking Dispositions" (Yeh, 1999), "Actively Open-minded Thinking scale" and "Deliberative Thinking scale" (Stanovich et al., 2016) as indices for personal thinking disposition (the reliability of these three questionnaires was evaluated in the first year). Sixty university students participated in the study in the second year. Half of the participants were assigned to "role-playing" and "empathy and integration" groups. Because the latter task was more demanding than the former task, participants were further categorized into successful and unsuccessful groups (with half of participants respectively) according to whether they could empathize people with opposing position. The results showed that the "role-playing" group spent more than reading other-side than myside arguments, considered other-side arguments more convincing, and generated more alternative arguments (considering different aspects from myside arguments). The performance of "successful empathy" group was similar to the "role-playing" group, but the difference in reading time was smaller, and they considered myside arguments more convincing. The reading time on myside and other-side arguments were not different in the "unsuccessful empathy" group and their performance was opposite to the other two groups. The results showed that the reasoning context (tasks) influenced the stages of reading, evaluating and generating arguments. Personal thinking disposition influenced the "unsuccessful empathy" group in that as participants tended to think more deliberately, they could generate more alternative arguments rather than focusing on the aspects of their own arguments for rebuttal.