The Effect of Self-Contradiction on Fallacious Reasoning

Abstract

A serial task was used in which the possibility of making related valid and fallacious inferences was alternated over a series of trials. The hypothesis was investigated that if valid inferences are forced to contradict previously made fallacious inferences, then subsequent fallacious inferences will be withheld. The results showed that self-contradiction tended to extinguish fallacious inferences in an all-or-none manner without affecting valid inferences.