People often base judgments on stereotypes, even when contradictory base-rate information is provided. In a sample of 438 students from two state universities, we tested several hypotheses regarding why people would prefer stereotype information over base-rates when making judgments: A) People believe stereotype information is more diagnostic than base-rate information, B) people find stereotype information more salient than base-rate information, or C) even though people have some intuitive access to base-rate information, they may need to engage in deliberation before they can make full use of it, and often fail to do so. In line with the deliberative failure account, and counter to the diagnosticity account, we found that inducing deliberation by having people evaluate statements supporting the use of base-rates increased the use of base-rate information. Moreover, counter to the salience and diagnosticity accounts, asking people to evaluate statements supporting the use of stereotypes decreased reliance on stereotype information. Additionally, more numerate subjects were more likely to make use of base-rate information.

We investigate a Gentzen-style proof system for the first-order μ-calculusbased on cyclic proofs, produced by unfolding fixed point formulasand detecting repeated proof goals. Our system uses explicit ordinalvariables and approximations to support a simple semantic inductiondischarge condition which ensures the well-foundedness of inductivereasoning. As the main result of this paper we propose a new syntacticdischarge condition based on traces and establish its equivalencewith the semantic condition. We give an automata-theoretic reformulationof this condition which is more suitable for practical proofs. Fora detailed comparison with previous work we consider two simpler syntacticconditions and show that they are more restrictive than our new condition.