Valid conclusions can be defeated if people can think of conditions that prevent the consequent to occur although the antecedent is given. The goal of the present research was to investigate how people consider these conditions when reasoning with legal conditionals such as "If a person kills another human, then this person should be punished for manslaughter." In Experiments 1 and 2 legal conditionals were presented to participants together with exculpatory circumstances, i.e., counterexamples. The participants' task was to decide whether they would adhere to the legal conditional rule and punish the offender. Participants were either lawyers (i.e., advanced law students and graduate lawyers) or legal laypeople. We found that laypeople often ignore exculpatory circumstances and adhere to the conditional rule when offences evoked high levels of moral outrage. Lawyers did not show this effect. In Experiment 3 laypeople showed difficulties even when asked to simply imagine exculpatory circumstances for highly morally outrageous offences. Results provide new evidence for the role of emotions--like moral outrage--in the consideration of counterexamples to legal conditionals.
For most its history, the psychology of reasoning was dominated by binary extensional logic. The "new paradigm" instead puts subjective degrees of belief centre stage, often represented as probabilities. The term "new paradigm" refers to Thomas Kuhn's popular theory of science, which describes scientific progress as discontinues process of alternating "normal" and "revolutionary" phases. We argue that the "new paradigm" is too vaguely defined and therefore does not allow a clear decision on what falls within its scope and what does not. We also show that before the new developments, the psychology of reasoning was neither in a phase of normal science, nor is the alleged new paradigm as revolutionary as the term suggests. Based on this analysis, we argue that the supposed opposition between a "new" and "old" paradigms hinders progress in the field. A more productive view is that current progress is developing in continuities where rival research programs stimulate each other in a fruitful way. The article closes with some topics where further connections between competing research programs are likely to promote progress in the psychology of reasoning.
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