Defeasible reasoning with legal conditionals

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 anothe...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Memory & cognition 2016-04, Vol.44 (3), p.499-517
Main Authors: Gazzo Castañeda, Lupita Estefania, Knauff, Markus
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Attorneys
Behavioral Science and Psychology
Cognitive Psychology
Crime - psychology
Criminal liability
Criminal sentences
Emotions
Female
Humans
Imprisonment
Law
Logic
Male
Manslaughter
Morals
Philosophy
Psychology
Punishment - psychology
Students
Studies
Thinking
Young Adult
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Summary: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.
ISSN:0090-502X
1532-5946
DOI:10.3758/s13421-015-0574-7