Error processes in syllogistic reasoning

Abstract

In recent years, a number of proposals have been advanced to account for the errors that subjects make in deductive inferences from invalid syllogisms. Principles such as erroneous conversion of premises, probabilistic inference, feature selection, and various other interpretation and combination processes have been suggested. The present paper focuses on the 32 invalid categorical syllogisms for which conversion of premises does not provide an explanation of subject error. An explanation is presented in terms of three error processes: the erroneous conversion of conclusions resulting from backward processing, the erroneous integration of information from the two premises, and the failure to consider hypothetical possibilities. Empirical predictions regarding the differential difficulty of the various premise combinations as well as the pattern of correlations between premise combinations are derived from this formulation, and data are presented that support these predictions. © 1978 Psychonomic Society, Inc.