Affiliation:
1. University of Tasmania, Australia
Abstract
The paper reports a study comparing performance on obligation and causal conditionals in the explicit standard order conditional selection task. Analysis indicated that both general and specific reasoning strategies are used when a request is given to disprove obligation conditionals, contradicting the prevalent view that only one of the two kinds of strategy is used and confirming the 1993 suggestions of Evans and later ones by Evans and Over. The incidence of general reasoning strategies in this situation is reduced, compared to that for other kinds of conditional in a disproof task probably because a specific reasoning strategy is available that is easier to use.