| Recently, tax researchers have suggested that the cognitive aspects of taxation are potentially fruitful areas for study. One such process, deductive reasoning, is vital to many aspects of our tax system. The present work examined the possible facilitation of deductive reasoning in the tax domain by conducting a series of experiments. The pragmatic reasoning schema theory, as presented in the psychology literature, was used as the theoretical framework for this series of experiments. This theory suggests that subjects perform more accurately on situations involving obligation situations because an appropriate schema is evoked.; For each experiment, a basic selection task was used. The typical selection task presents each subject with a scenario followed by the rule and four selections. Subjects are instructed to choose those selections that they would need to examine to determine if the rule is being violated. The first experiment used this type of task to examine the effect of wording (cued or standard) and type of task (abstract, thematic-nontax, thematic-tax) on deductive reasoning. The second experiment also examined the effect of wording along with the level of familiarity of the subjects for the tax rule. The third experiment examined the effect of the wording for a fictitious, yet plausible, tax rule on the performance of subjects with familiarity and experience.; While the use of cued wording did not significantly increase accuracy of reasoning performance on all rules, in no case was performance with this wording worse than performance with the standard wording. These results suggest that this may be a relatively low cost means of potentially increasing accuracy of performance with at least some tax rules. Given this finding, potential implications of the findings for practitioners, policy makers and researchers are discussed. |
