The relative contribution of content and context factors on the interpretation of conditionals

Previous research showed that conditional reasoning is affected by the content and the context of the studied problems. In this study, we investigate in detail the relative effect of three factors, namely the number of alternative or disabling reasons, speaker control, and pragmatic type, on the interpretation of conditionals. These factors were subject to prior research, but mostly in a fragmented way. This study indicates that some important nuances must be added to earlier findings. The number of alternatives and disablers, the speaker control, and the pragmatic type of conditional statements all have a considerable effect on how we interpret these sentences and reason with them, but they do not have equal weight. Alternatives/disablers play a significant but very limited role on the interpretation of conditionals, while the influence of speaker control and of pragmatic type is far more imperative.