The specificity of terms affects conditional reasoning

Conditional inferences can be phrased with unspecific terms (“If a person is on a diet, then the person loses weight. A person is on a diet. The person loses weight”) or specific terms (“If Anna is on a diet, then Anna loses weight. Anna is on a diet. Anna loses weight”). We investigate whether the specificity of terms affects people's acceptance of inferences. In Experiment 1, inferences with specific terms received higher acceptance ratings than inferences with unspecific terms. In Experiments 2 and 3, we used the same problems as in Experiment 1 but also problems with unspecific terms in the conditional and specific terms in the categorical and vice versa. When the conditional and the categorical had the same specificity, results were as in Experiment 1. When the specificity of the conditional and the categorical mismatched, acceptance ratings were lower. Our results illustrate the importance of phrasing on reasoning.