Issues in Reasoning about Iffy propositions: Deductive Rationality in Validating and Testing Conditional Inferences

We asked people to validate conditional inferences. The results show, first, that people are more likely to look for a falsification versus confirmation. Second, falsification rates are lower for logically valid versus invalid inferences. Deductively valid inferences are inferences that follow necessarily. Our Experiment (N = 96) shows that emphasising this logicality constraint increases falsification rates and corroborates that people who test an inference by considering counterexamples are more likely to make logically correct evaluations. The results are discussed in relation to the mental models theory of