A curious belief-bias effect: reasoning with false premises and inhibition of real-life information

Many studies have shown that inferential behavior is strongly affected by access to real-life information about premises. However, it is also true that both children and adults can often make logically appropriate inferences that lead to empirically unbelievable conclusions. One way of reconciling these is to suppose that logical instructions allow inhibition of information about premises that would otherwise be retrieved during reasoning. On the basis of this idea, we hypothesized that it should be easier to endorse an empirically false conclusion on the basis of clearly false premises than on the basis of relatively believable premises. Two studies are presented that support this hypothesis.