Conditional Reasoning: Scenario or Context Effects?

Abstract

This paper studies the importance of contextual factors in reasoning with conditional inference tasks. In this experiment subjects were given conditional sentences in the context of narrative texts. Short stories about scenarios of the daily life were described in these texts. The experiment manipulated: a) context (causal or promises/threats), b) degree of factual relation between antecedent and consequent of conditional (deterministic, probabilistic or without relation), c) congruence between the factual consequence explicit in the story and the logic conclusion and d) conditional rules. The results were related to previous investigations about syllogistic inference (Valiña & De Vega, 1988) and were discussed within the framework of theoretical modes about pragmatic reasoning.