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Wason selection task
Also known as: Wason Selection Tasks, Wason task
Facts (14)
Sources
Evolutionary Psychology | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy iep.utm.edu 12 facts
procedureLeda Cosmides and John Tooby compared human performance on unfamiliar social rules versus unfamiliar non-social rules to test if familiarity explains performance differences in Wason Selection Tasks.
claimSwedish psychologist Peter Wason devised the "Wason Selection Task" in the 1960s to investigate how well subjects check conditional rules.
referenceLeda Cosmides published 'The Logic of Social Exchange: Has Natural Selection Shaped how Humans Reason? Studies with the Wason Selection Task' in 1989, which argues that natural selection has shaped human reasoning, particularly in social exchange contexts.
measurementIn experiments conducted by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, 75% of subjects correctly answered the unfamiliar social Wason Selection Task, while only 21% correctly answered the unfamiliar non-social Wason Selection Task.
formulaIn formal logic, a material conditional statement is false if and only if the antecedent is true and the consequent is false, meaning the logically correct response in the Wason Selection Task is to select the P-card and the not-Q-card.
claimPeter Wason discovered that most subjects in his selection task fail to choose the logically correct P-card and not-Q-card, instead choosing only the P-card or the P-card and the Q-card.
referenceLeda Cosmides designed an unfamiliar Wason Selection Task involving a social contract rule: "If a man eats cassava root, then he must have a tattoo on his face," accompanied by a story about Polynesian island sexual mores and aphrodisiacs.
referenceLeda Cosmides designed an unfamiliar Wason Selection Task involving a non-social rule: "If you eat duiker meat, then you have found an ostrich eggshell," accompanied by a story about anthropologists hypothesizing that duikers feed on ostrich shells.
measurementIn the Wason Selection Task, performance varies by content: 48% of subjects correctly solved the "Boston/transportation" problem, less than 25% correctly solved the "D rating/code 3" rule, and nearly 75% correctly solved the "drinking beer/over 21" rule.
procedureThe Wason Selection Task involves presenting subjects with a rule of the form "If P, then Q" and four cards representing P, not-P, Q, and not-Q; subjects are then asked to identify which cards must be turned over to determine if the rule has been violated.
claimLeda Cosmides and John Tooby observed that robust and replicable content effects in Wason Selection Tasks were found only for rules that related terms recognizable as benefits and costs/requirements in the format of a standard social contract.
claimLeda Cosmides and John Tooby argued that the content effect found in Wason Selection Tasks is due to the fact that some tasks involve a social contract rule.
The Impact of Cognitive Biases on Professionals' Decision-Making frontiersin.org 1 fact
measurementResearch by Rachlinski et al. (2013) reported that 90% of judges solve the Wason task incorrectly, though this does not necessarily imply that confirmation bias affects their regular professional work.
Evolutionary psychology - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org 1 fact
claimEmpirical support for the domain-specific theory in evolutionary psychology stems almost entirely from performance on variations of the Wason selection task, which tests only one subtype of deductive reasoning.