One of our fantastic graduate students, Dun-Ya Hu, has recently has won a 2025 Psychonomic Society
Graduate Travel Award!
Bringing together cognitive research on reasoning and social psychological research on persuasion, Dun-Ya Hu’s research examined how logical structure and social cues jointly shape people’s judgments of argument quality. A group of over 600 US-based participants evaluated arguments that were logically compelling or weak, presented by speakers differing in their ethnicity or nationality.
It was found that while people could distinguish strong from weak arguments, their evaluations were also significantly shaped by who was making the argument. In some cases, high-quality arguments were rated less valid depending on the source. Participants’ personal beliefs about whether certain social categories are biological or socially constructed also influenced their evaluations. Taken together, research shows that judgments of an argument’s validity are shaped in subtle but important ways by social cues about the argument’s source.