Sangeet Khemlani

I wrote a new chapter on the psychology of syllogistic reasoning in the forthcoming Handbook of Rationality that summarizes recent advances in the field. Here’s a quick summary:

Psychologists have studied syllogistic inferences for more than a century, because they can serve as a microcosm of human rationality. “Syllogisms” is a term that refers to a set of 64 reasoning arguments, each of which is comprised of two premises, such as: “All of the designers are women. Some of the women are not employees. What, if anything, follows?” People make systematic mistakes on such problems, and they appear to reason using different strategies. A meta-analysis showed that many existing theories fail to explain such patterns. To address the limitations of previous accounts, two recent theories synthesized both heuristic and deliberative processing. This chapter reviews both accounts and addresses their strengths. It concludes by arguing that if syllogistic reasoning serves as a sensible microcosm of rationality, the synthesized theories may provide directions on how to resolve broader conflicts that vex psychologists of reasoning and human thinking.

You can read the full chapter here.