Syllogistic reasoning time: disconfirmation disconfirmed

Abstract

Models of deductive reasoning typically assume that reasoners dedicate more logical analysis to unbelievable conclusions than to believable ones (e.g., Evans, Newstead, Allen, & Pollard, 1994; Newstead, Pollard, Evans, & Allen, 1992). When the conclusion is believable, reasoners are assumed to accept it without much further thought, but when it is unbelievable, they are assumed to analyze the conclusion, presumably in an attempt to disconfirm it. This disconfirmation hypothesis leads to two predictions, which were tested in the present experiment: Reasoners should take longer to reason about problems leading to unbelievable conclusions, and reasoners should consider more models or representations of premise information for unbelievable conclusions than for believable ones. Neither prediction was supported by our data. Indeed, we observed that reasoners took significantly longer to reason about believable conclusions than about unbelievable ones and generated the same number of representations regardless of the believability of the premises. We propose a model, based on a modified version of verbal reasoning theory (Polk & Newell, 1995), that does not depend on the disconfirmation assumption.