Abstract

The current study examined response patterns of young adults (N = 861) to a particular syllogism with abstract categories that contained the fallacy of the undistributed middle. Participants had to evaluate all given conclusions. Results showed that, despite being invalid, conclusions that used the word “some” were more likely to be selected as valid or possible compared to conclusions that used “all” or “none”. In addition, we also analyzed participants’ solutions to the task at the individual level (i.e., all evaluations to conclusions that contained the end terms). The aim was to detect dominant patterns. Results showed five dominant patterns. The significance of these findings and limitations are discussed.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.