The Effect of Authority on the Persuasiveness of Mathematical Arguments

By Matthew Inglis, Juan Pablo Mejía-Ramos. 2009

104 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Three experiments are reported that investigate the extent to which an authority figure influences the level of persuasion undergraduate students and research-active mathematicians invest in mathematical arguments. We demonstrate that, in some situations, both students and researchers rate arguments as being more persuasive when they are associated with an expert mathematician than when the author is anonymous. We develop a model that accounts for these data by suggesting that, for both students and researchers, an authority figure only plays a role when there is already some uncertainty about the argument's mathematical status. Implications for pedagogy, and for future research, are discussed.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c2b2f504d0ff993afb2314258df67d886b244138

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Education

In Statistics and Probability

Citations in the corpus

The Social Construction of Authority Among Peers and Its Implications for Collaborative Mathematics Problem Solving (2016, background): “This occurs regardless of whether the ideas are productive; that is, ideas that might be incorrect or potentially misleading might be positively evaluated and ultimately accepted (Inglis & Mejia-Ramos, 2009).”
How Mathematicians Obtain Conviction: Implications for Mathematics Instruction and Research on Epistemic Cognition (2014, background): “A similar result was found in a separate study by Inglis and Mejia-Ramos (2009). They presented 180 mathematicians a more sophisticated empirical argument in support of the claim that the decimal expansion of π has, somewhere, one million 7’s in a row.”
Why and how mathematicians read proofs: further evidence from a survey study (2014, methodology): “Method Following the methodology employed by Inglis and Mejia-Ramos (2009), we collected data through the Internet in order to maximize our sample size.”
Why and how mathematicians read proofs: an exploratory study (2011, background): “His evaluation of the validity of Perelman’s proof did not come from the deductive process that Perelman employed, but from the authority of the mathematical community and Perelman himself (cf., Inglis & Mejia-Ramos, 2009 ).”
What Do We Mean by Mathematical Proof (2011, background): “This discouragement is reflected in the common mantra, “A picture is not a proof” [34, 35].”
Mathematics Majors' Perceptions of Conviction, Validity, and Proof (2010, background): “Inglis and Mejia-Ramos (2009a) suggested students’ (and mathematicians’) use of external proof schemes may be more nuanced than this.”
Teaching Fourth and Fifth Graders to Evaluate Information Sources During Text Comprehension (2013, background): “The cognitive authority of the source also plays a role in understanding specialty discourse, such as mathematical proofs (Inglis & Mejia-Ramos, 2009).”
Expert and Novice Approaches to Reading Mathematical Proofs (2012, result): “Finally, this third hypothesis is also consistent with earlier observations of a gap between introspections about expert mathematicians’ behavior and their actual behavior (Inglis & Mejia-Ramos, 2009; Weber, 2008).”