DEDUCTIVE REASONING : HOW DOES EMOTION AFFECT

OUR LOGIC?

Consider the following statement:

Women don't think logically because they are swayed by emotion and as we all
know, logical thinkers do not allow themselves to be influenced by emotion.
Although women may want to deny this popular stereotype, the argument is
actually valid. This is not, of course, to say that the premises and hence the
conclusion are true. Male chauvinists take heed! Often in daily life we tend to rely
on our attitude toward the content when evaluating an argument rather than the
validity of the inferences involved. Advertisers can use this characteristic to
advantage, creating associations like `All these show-winning dogs eat brand X
dogfood', and calculating that consumers will add `My dog will be a show-winner
too because I feed him brand X'. The argument is of course invalid, but how many
cans of brand X are sold because owners would like to think that their dog could
be a show-winner?

This distinction between the validity of an argument and an individual's belief in

the truth or falsity of a conclusion is important to note. The form of a valid
argument is such that whenever its premises are true, its conclusions must be
true. For an invalid argument there is no such link between the truth or falsity of
its premises and the truth or falsity of its conclusions. So, if a valid argument has
a false conclusion (e.g. women never think logically) then it must have a false
premise (i.e. logical thinkers are never swayed by emotion).

To illustrate this distinction and the reasoning errors that arise. Lefford (1946)
asked college students to judge both the validity of a set of syllogisms and the
truth or falsity of the conclusions of those syllogisms. The syllogisms differed in
subject matter. Some were based on socially or politically controversial topics
likely to excite an emotional judgment, while others contained neutral material
(e.g. the use of barometers to gauge weather changes). Lefford found that
subjects made fewer reasoning errors on the neutrally toned syllogisms and that
the subjects' judgment that a conclusion was true tended to bias their judgment of
validity. So, for instance, if a subject agreed with the conclusion, he or she was
more likely to judge the argument as valid: if a subject disagreed with the
conclusion, he or she tended to judge the argument as invalid. This was true for
both emotional and neutral syllogisms.

This workshop is based on Lefford's study. We are interested in the effect of

two factors on syllogistic reasoning - (1) the subject's agreement with the
conclusion, and (2) the content of the argument: i.e. emotional versus neutral
topics.

General procedure
Generating a set of syllogisms is the most difficult part of this study. There
should be enough information presented below and in the references to help
those of you who have not done a course in logic, but you will need to devote a
fair amount of time to this task.

For a description of the various forms of syllogisms you can refer to any
introductory logic text book with a section on either syllogistic reasoning or
symbolic logic. You might also refer to a summary included in Chapman and
Chapman (1959) which contains the main points you will need for this workshop.

For simplicity's sake, four valid syllogistic forms and four invalid syllogistic
forms are, set out below. You can use these to generate your set of syllogisms, or
if this is too difficult, select appropriate examples from Lefford. Of course, if you
have some expertise in this area, you could use other forms, based either on
syllogistic or symbolic argument forms.
Four Valid Forms
1 2 3
No M is P No P is M All M are P
All S is M Some S is M All M are S
Therefore no S is P Therefore some S is not P Therefore some S are P

4
All P are M (Premise 1)
No M is S (Premise 2)
Therefore no S is P(Conclusion)

Four Invalid Forms

5 6 7
All M is P All P is M Some M is not P
Some S is M All S is M All M are S
Therefore some S is Therefore all S is P Therefore no S is P
not P

8
All P is M
Some M is S
Therefore no S is P

T o generate your set of syllogisms, replace each of the three letters, S, P and
M with a term which can be a category, a name or a property. Take care to be
consistent in substitution within each argument. You will need one emotionally
toned version and one neutral version for each of these eight forms. Here are
some emotional and neutral examples of the valid and invalid forms listed above.

VALID FORM (1): EMOTIONAL

No politician is really honest Malcolm Fraser is a politician
Therefore Malcolm Fraser is not really honest
(Note that `all' in the second premise can be replaced by a proper name or a set
of names, i.e. implying `all Malcolm Frasers'.)

For the emotionally toned syllogisms, it might be better to state the conclusion
first, especially if your subjects are not likely to believe it. So:
Malcolm Fraser is not really honest because he is a politician, and, after all, no
politicians are really honest.

VALID FORM (3): NEUTRAL

All whales are mammals and they all swim, therefore some creatures that can
swim are mammals.

INVALID FORM (6): EMOTIONAL

All socialists favour bank nationalisation
 Labor Party supporters favour bank nationalisation
Therefore Labor Party supporters are socialists.

Or stated differently:
Labor Party supporters are really socialists because they favour bank
nationalisation and all socialists favour bank nationalisation.
Contrast this syllogism to an analogous neutral version:

INVALID FORM (6): NEUTRAL

All whales are mammals All kangaroos are
mammals Therefore all kangaroos are whales.

When generating your syllogisms, you will also need to consider the content of
the conclusions. For example, the conclusion - all kangaroos are whales - is
obviously false, and as Lefford and others suggest, this is likely to bias the
subject's judgment of the validity of the argument. To test this proposal you will
need to vary the apparent truth/falsity of the conclusion to your syllogisms. The
easiest way to do this is to generate your emotional syllogisms so that the four
valid forms have apparently false conclusions and the four invalid forms have
apparently true conclusions. This will ensure that subjects making validity
judgments on the basis of the apparent truth of the conclusions will always
produce errors for these emotional syllogisms. You could use the neutral
syllogisms as a control (i.e. have all the conclusions true). This simplification
partially confounds the truth of conclusions variable with emotionality. A more
complicated design which avoids this problem is mentioned in the alternatives
section. It is, of course, easier to determine which conclusions are likely to be
seen as true or false for the neutral syllogisms than for the emotional syllogisms.
You could, perhaps, ask some friends to judge the statements prior to the study
and accept a consensus.

For this study, you can use a repeated measures design, presenting each
subject with 16 syllogisms - 8 emotionally toned and 8 neutral, matched for valid
and invalid forms. If you decide to use argument forms other than those listed
above, take care to match the syllogistic forms across the emotional and neutral
versions.

The syllogisms could be printed one per page, and stapled to form a booklet.
This would enable you to present the syllogisms in a different random order for
each subject. Use Lefford's :instructions as a guide to devising your own. He
asked. subjects first to judge the validity of the arguments (that is, whether or not
`the conclusions can justifiably be drawn from the premises'). After making these
judgments, subjects were asked to go back over the conclusions and indicate
whether, in their opinion, the conclusions were True or False.

Simply calculate the average number of incorrect validity judgments for the
emotional syllogisms and the average number of incorrect validity judgments for
the neutral arguments. Do subjects make more errors when judging emotional
arguments? In addition, you could enter each syllogism into a 2 X 2 contingency
table (conclusions judged true or false X arguments judged valid or invalid) and
then calculate a chi-square to see whether subjects do tend to judge arguments
as valid or invalid depending on whether they see the conclusion as true or false.

If you have both males and females in your sample, you could check the
results for sex differences. Is there any support for the syllogism that opened this
workshop? In discussion, you might ask why most people find these syllogisms,
especially the emotionally toned versions, so difficult.

Henle (1962) argues that these reasoning errors do not necessarily indicate
that subjects are unable to think logically. She suggests that when syllogisms are
presented on everyday or controversial topics, subjects do not see the problem
as one requiring the application of logical rules. How might you investigate this
suggestion?

ALTERNATIVES

To separate the three variables - apparent truth or falsity of conclusion, validity or

invalidity of argument and emotional or neutral content - you would need a 2 X 2 X 2
design. Again you can use a repeated measures procedure, obtaining a score for
each subject in each cell. A multiple regression analysis would allow you to see
whether emotionality or truth/ falsity was the most important variable or whether both
variables contribute equally to the judgments of the arguments.

You might be interested in examining the `atmosphere effect' (Chapman and

Chapman, 1959). This effect refers to the finding that subjects tend to use the
`atmosphere' created by the words `all', `some' and `no' in the premises as a guide
to judging the conclusions. Chapman and Chapman find that, for syllogisms like
Valid form 1 above, subjects are biassed towards selecting a negative conclusion in
a multiple-choice task. You could consider Johnson-Laird and Steedman's (1978)
criticisms of this `atmosphere' theory.

Another way to investigate reasoning ability is simply to present subjects with

pairs of premises and ask them to generate logical conclusions. JohnsonLaird and
Steedman (1978) argue that this is a better way to investigate reasoning, since
subjects who are asked to judge the validity of an argument could simply decide by
guessing rather than by making inferences. Using this method, Johnson-Laird and
Steedman find both variation in the difficulty of problems and a bias toward particular
forms of conclusions being linked to particular patterns of premises, i.e. a figural
effect. For example, for the Valid form 1 there is a bias towards having the terms in
the conclusion ordered S-P, while for the Valid form 4, the bias is P-S. This figural
effect can override the actual validity of the argument.

It would be interesting to see if this pattern of results still arose when the truth and
content of the premises were manipulated. The results of such a study would have
important implications for the theory of syllogistic reasoning outlined by Johnson-
Laird and Steedman. You might ask your subjects how they did the task. Do their
explanations fit Johnson-Laird and Steedman's theory?
REFERENCES
Chapman, L. J., and Chapman, J. P. Atmosphere effect re-examined. Journal of
Experimental Psychology, 1959, 58, 220-6.
Henle, E. On the relation between logic and thinking. PsychologicalReview,
1962,69,366-78.
Lefford, A. The influence of emotional subject matter on logical reasoning. Journal
of General Psychology, 1946, 34, 127-51.
REFERENCE FOR ALTERNATIVES
Johnson-Laird, P. N., and Steedman, M. The psychology of syllogisms. Cognitive
Psychology, 1978, 10, 64-99.
This workshop is from :
Bennet, A., Hausfeld, S., Reeve, R. A., & Smith, J. (1982). Workshops in cognitive
processes. Sydney: New South Wales University Press.