Two experiments examine speed-up in argument pairs of various propositional forms. In the first experiment, participants were presented with pairs of conditional arguments. Some of these pairs had a form of a valid Modus Ponens (MP) inference, whereas other pairs had a form of a fallacy of Affirming the Consequent (AC). In both argument pairs, presentation of the prime led to a significant spee...

We suggest and test an integrated framework explaining how the interpretation of and the reasoning from causal conditionals (e.g., "If you fertilize a flower it will bloom") depend on exceptions. In the model availability of exceptional situations (e.g., "the flower was not watered enough") reduces the subjective conditional probability of the consequent given the antecedent, P(q p). The condit...