ABSTRACT
The psychology of reasoning has for many years been centred on the deductive reasoning paradigm in which people are asked to assess logical arguments, or generate valid conclusions from given premises. Some very early experiments of this kind that can be found in the psychological literature are the studies of reasoning with the classical syllogisms reported by Wilkins (1928) and by Woodworth and Sells (1935). However, the history of the modern paradigm dates from the early 1960s since when we have seen a dramatic acceleration in experimental reports in the literature using this method, turning this in to a major field of cognitive psychology by the end of the 20th century. Three comprehensive text book reviews of the field published at roughly ten year intervals (Wason and Johnson-Laird, 1972; Evans, 1982; Evans, Newstead, and Byrne, 1993) demonstrate this dramatic increase in usage of the paradigm (see also Manktelow, 1999, for a more recent review of the paradigm).
