10.1177/0146167202238368 ARTICLE PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETIN Fiedler et al. / SIMPSON’S PARADOX Inductive Reasoning and Judgment Interference: Experiments on Simpson’s Paradox

In a series of experiments on inductive reasoning, participants assessed the relationship between gender, success, and a covariate in a situation akin to Simpson’s paradox: Although women were less successful then men according to overall statis-tics, they actually fared better then men at either of two universi-ties. Understanding trivariate relationships of this kind requires cognitive routines similar to analysis of covariance. Across the first five experiments, however, participants generalized the dis-advantage of women at the aggregate level to judgments refer-ring to the different levels of the covariate, even when motivation was high and appropriate mental models were activated. The remaining three experiments demonstrated that Simpson’s para-dox could be mastered when the salience of the covariate was increased and when the salience of gender was decreased by the inclusion of temporal cues that disambiguate the causal statu