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Article published In: Pragmatics & Cognition
Vol. 31:1 (2024) ► pp.244–285

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Fallacies and biases

The case of the straw man

 | Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences
 | University of Amsterdam
 | University of Amsterdam
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with the University of Amsterdam.

Published online: 11 October 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.00046.ser
Abstract
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.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1The strawman fallacy
    • 2.2A dual-process account on fallacy processing and motivated reasoning
  • 3.The present study
  • 4.Experiment
    • 4.1Memory task
      • 4.1.1Participants
      • 4.1.2Materials
      • 4.1.3Procedure
      • 4.1.4Analysis
        • 4.1.4.1Accuracy scores
        • 4.1.4.2Response times
    • 4.2Rating task
      • 4.2.1Participants
      • 4.2.2Materials
      • 4.2.3Procedure
      • 4.2.4Analysis
    • 4.3Interview
      • 4.3.1Participants
      • 4.3.2Materials
      • 4.3.3Procedure
      • 4.3.4Analysis
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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