Individual Differences and the Search for Counterexamples in Syllogistic Reasoning

Much recent debate in reasoning research has focused on the role that counterexample search plays in human reasoning (see Newstead, Handley, & Buck, in press). This chapter offers a contribution to this debate. We present a series of experimental and individual differences analyses suggesting that although searching for counterexamples may be a weak tendency overall, there are clear differences in this tendency that manifest themselves in different ways on different sorts of problems.