Fooled again: The received wisdom is that human reasoning proceeds by formal rules. But Princeton psychologist Philip Johnson-Laird thinks that, while we can with much effort follow the rules of deduction, we usually don’t think that way, instead employing shortcuts — building “mental models” of the possibilities of a situation — that are much less energy-intensive. The problem is that that, if falsity enters into these models, logic fails us. Johnson-Laird feels this type of confusion may be responsible for some disastrous examples of human error, e.g. the Chernobyl meltdown and the downing of KAL fligot 007 after it strayed off course into Soviet airspace in 1983.

You might have experienced this logical breakdown while hiking
or driving with the aid of a map. If you are on course, then the
landscape you see corresponds to the features the map tells
you to expect. But if you find yourself off-course, working out
your location–and the way back to the right road–gets much
more difficult. You have to deal with false situations: if you
had been on the right track you would have seen a gate
leading into a wood, for example. But you didn’t, and
attempting to compare what you didn’t see with what you
should have seen leads you easily into confusion. Eventually,
you give up on the logical solution to your problem and head
onwards. When you do see something that relates to the map
working out your whereabouts becomes trivial. That’s because
it’s easier to deal with a true scenario than a false one.

The article contains some logic puzzles that may show you — they did me — how easy it is for reasoning to break down. New Scientist