When processing political arguments, people are strongly affected by their prior ideological beliefs. Political cognition often relies on two types of ideological biases. Firstly, confirmation bias leads addressees of political communication to accept arguments that affirm their preferred ideological positions. Secondly, disconfirmation bias probes reasoners to reject arguments that provide attitudinally incongruent evidence. Here, we report the findings of an experiment aimed at investigating the role of biased reasoning on perceptions of argument soundness. We focused on the processing of the (...) strawman fallacy to determine whether strawman effectiveness is contingent upon the activation of different ideological biases. We examined argument comprehension, argument evaluation and fallacy identification by means of a memory task, a rating task and an interview. Our data suggests that ideological biases and fallacy effect are associated with deliberative cognitive settings and marks a distinction between evaluative attitudes and the capacity to identify fallacies in political argumentation. (shrink)

How people distinguish well-justified from poorly justified arguments is not well known. To study the involvement of intuitive and analytic cognitive processes, we contrasted participants’ personal beliefs with argument strength that was determined in relation to established criteria of sound argumentation. In line with previous findings indicating that people have a myside bias, participants (N = 249) made more errors on conflict than on no-conflict trials. On conflict trials, errors and correct responses were practically equal in terms of response times (...) and mouse-tracking indices of hesitation. Similarly to recent findings on formal reasoning, these findings indicate that correct reasoning about informal arguments may not necessitate corrective analytic processing. We compared findings across four argument schemes but found few differences. The findings are discussed in light of intuitive logic theories and the notion that evaluating informal arguments could be based on implicit knowledge of argument criteria. (shrink)