The teachings herein disclose interference cancellation processing that uses hard decision logic for simplified estimation of interfering signals, in combination with soft scaling of the hard decisions for better interference cancellation performance, particularly in low signal quality conditions. In one aspect, the soft scaling may be understood as attenuating the amount of interference cancellation applied by a receiver, in dependence on the dynamically changing received signal quality at the receiver. More attenuation is applied at lower signal quality because the hard decisions are less reliable at lower signal qualities, while less (or no) attenuation is applied at higher signal qualities, reflecting the higher reliability of the hard decisions at higher signal qualities. Signal quality may be quantized into ranges, with a different value of soft scaling factor used for each range, or a soft scaling factor may be calculated for the continuum of measured signal quality.