THE ROLE OF IMPLICIT AND EXPLICIT NEGATION IN CONDITIONAL REASONING BIAS

Matching bias in conditional reasoning consists of a tendency to selec t as relevant cases whose lexical content marches thai referred to in the conditional statement, regardless of the presence of negatives. Ev ans (1983) demonstrated that use of explicit rather than implicit nega tive eases markedly reduced the matching bias effect on the conditiona l truth table task. In apparent contrast, recent studies of explicit n egation on the Wason selection task have failed to iind evidence of lo gical facilitation. Experiment I of the present study strongly replica ted the Evans (1983) findings and extended them to three forms of cond itional statement. Experiments 2 and 3 showed further that the use of explicit negatives removed completely the matching bias effect on the Wason selection task. However, consistent with other recent studies, t his elimination of bias did not lead to facilitation of correct respon ding. The findings are interpreted as providing evidence chat matching bias reflects a linguistically cued relevance effect. (C) 1996 Academ ic Press, Inc.