Informal reasoning fallacies belong to a persuasive tactic, leading to a conclusion that is not supported by premises but reached through emotions and/or misleading and incomplete information. Previous research focused on the ability to recognize informal reasoning fallacies. However, the recognition itself does not necessarily mean immunity to their influence on decisions made. An experiment was designed to study the relationship between the presence of informal reasoning fallacies and a consequent decision. Having conducted paired comparisons of distributions, we have found some support for the hypothesis that informal reasoning fallacies affect decision-making more substantially than non-fallacious reasoning—strong support in the case of a slippery slope, weak in that of appeal to fear, anecdotal evidence argument defying evaluation. Numeracy and cognitive reflection seem to be associated with higher resistance to the slippery slope, but do not diminish appeal to fear.

非正式推理谬误属于一种有说服力的策略，导致得出的结论没有前提支持，而是通过情绪和/或误导性和不完整的信息得出的。以前的研究侧重于识别非正式推理谬误的能力。然而，承认本身并不一定意味着不受他们对决策影响的影响。一项实验旨在研究非正式推理谬误的存在与随之而来的决定之间的关系。通过对分布进行配对比较，我们发现非正式推理谬误比非谬误推理对决策的影响更大的假设得到了一些支持——在滑坡的情况下强有力的支持，在诉诸恐惧的情况下支持较弱，轶事证据论据无视评估。