Deduction
The Basic Idea
Like many of the concepts we come across in behavioral science, deduction, or deductive reasoning can seem terribly complicated, especially when applied to abstract or hypothetical situations. Thankfully, it’s something we do in our everyday lives, often without paying it too much attention.
Deduction is simply the logic we use when we draw from something we observe generally, and apply it to a specific case. Consider the below example;
- All horses have four legs.
- Bill is a horse.
- Therefore, Bill has four legs.
It helps to think of deduction as the opposite of induction – which happens when we move in the other direction, from a specific case to a generality.
- Bill is a horse.
- Bill has four legs.
- Therefore, all horses have four legs.
The degree to which we can rely on deduction depends on whether our argument is sound and valid. Deduction has been highly influential in philosophy, mathematics, computer science and more recently, artificial intelligence. Many economic decision-making models are also based on principles of deduction.1
I think, therefore I am
– René Descartes
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
