Go ahead, prove that God does not exist! On high school students’ ability to deal with fallacious arguments

Informal reasoning fallacies are arguments that are psychologically pervasive but logically incorrect. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that students’ ability to identify the fallacies is associated with a process of text comprehension, specifically with a sub-process of inference during text comprehension. One hundred and eighty four high school students from three grade levels of an urban heterogeneous high school in Israel participated in the study. The students were asked to complete informal reasoning fallacies and text comprehension tasks. It was found that performance in the text comprehension tasks significantly predicted students’ ability to identify the fallacies.