Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In human reasoning, the logical form and content of assertions has an impact on the conclusions people derive. Yet, research in different reasoning domains often focuses primarily either on the structure (syllogisms) or on content effects (conditionals). Both explore human reasoning capabilities and response patterns aiming to get a better understanding of how humans reason, so a further step would be to examine whether effects are carried over from one domain to another. To gain a deeper understanding of the general mechanisms underlying reasoning, it is valuable to adopt perspectives from other domains. Towards that, we conducted a study where the syllogistic content was "translated" from established conditional contents that focus on suppressing logically (in-)valid inferences. We found a belief bias effect - a decrease of the effect of the logical structure, but not a suppression effect related to logical (in-)validity, alternatives and disablers, like in conditionals.