 Pelletier and Elio (1994)  investigate various relevant factors that influence subjects’ reasoning about exceptions of defaults or inheritance relations. Their study makes use of the benchmark problems for defeasible reasoning proposed in  Lifschitz (1989).  It is, for instance, observed that the exceptional status of an object A with respect to some default is more likely to spread to other objects if they share properties with A that may play a role in explaining the exceptional status. For example, when confronted with a student club that violates the default that student clubs only allow for student members, subjects are more likely to ascribe this exceptional status also to another club if they learn that both clubs have been struggling to maintain minimum membership requirements. 