ABSTRACT
Deductive reasoning is the process of drawing or evaluating conclusions from a set of premises. A key finding in the deductive reasoning literature is that the content of the premises affects the conclusions of reasoners. Using the Wason (1966) selection task, researchers have found that participants are more likely to respond in accord with normative logic when reasoning with deontic rules than other types of rules (for review, see Evans, Newstead, & Bryne, 1993). A deontic rule specifies what is permissible or obligatory given some set of circumstances. For example, If someone is drinking beer, then that person must be at least 18 years old (Griggs & Cox, 1982). Some researchers have claimed there is something special about reasoning with deontic rules (Cheng & Holyoak, 1985; Cosmides, 1989), while others have questioned the supporting evidence, claiming the selection task is not a reasoning task at all (Sperber, Girotto, Cara, 1995). Nevertheless, conditional reasoning theories, such as mental models and mental logic theories, have included pragmatic considerations to deal with these content effects (Braine & O’Brien, 1991; Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 2002). The current experiment examines content effects in reasoning and belief revision without using the selection task.
