2) As pointed out by Bryan, many people think that if A implies B, then B implies A. (They may also confuse “if” with “only if”, “implies” with “implied by”, and “necessary condition” with “sufficient condition”.) I had to disabuse a graduate student in physics of this misconception not long ago; I had expected better of someone holding a physics degree.

3) I, too, must agree with Mike Hopkins. Version 2 of the test concords with common practice in the US, and I suspect that at least some of those who answer this question correctly are merely falling back on their own experience. If the rule for version 2 was modified somewhat so that it deviated from common experience—say, “if a person is drinking soda, then he or she must be under 21 years of age”—I suspect that a smaller percentage would get it right (see previous point).

4) Rather than just having the respondents give their answers, wouldn’t it be more instructive to ask them to explain how they arrived at their answers? (Multiple choice questions are such poor gauges of a person’s line of reasoning.) Of course, not asking the respondents to explain their reasoning gives the testers greater latitude to arrive at spurious and fallacious conclusions.

In Test-2, the real-world context bypasses all the need to explain the assumptions and the symbols. With no thought whatsoever, the symbols “drinks” and “ages” are easily differentiated.

Test-2 has the benefit of capitalizing on a pre-existing understanding that makes it easy to instantly absorb the task at hand. Test-1 does not. When the rules of the game map directly to preexisting experience, no time is needed to explain them.

It’s not obvious to me that that’s evolution speaking.

F cannot possibly have a D on the other side.

nic

em tasol

Lawrie

I did fine on the second test, and I believe that, yes indeed, the reason people perform the way they do on the two tests is because we bring a scripted form of reasoning to the second one based on real world experience. In a way, it follows what Roger Schank has proposed in his book Dynamic Memory. He claims that we mostly solve problems through being reminded of previous similar circumstances, as opposed to truly working out all the gory details from first principles everytime. And when we encounter new situations, we remeber the exceptions of those new situations as compared to what we were most reminded of. Truly, we get through the day by applying our past experiences, rather than thinking too hard.

Robert

The Wason card test results might be compelling if they were found in people who were raised in isolation, ie, people who would have had as little practical experience with social exchange as most of us would with arbitrary logic puzzles. Then any differences would be attributable to genetically specified brain wiring. The happy rareness of such individuals means the tests must be conducted with normal people, who have had to solve reciprocal social exchange problems numerous times per day, every day of their lives. What’s more, these problems will vary widely in their specifics, so a generalized representation will be easy to form, so as to map quickly to new problems. Nor is it required that this social exchange knowledge is represented in the mind in logical form, as the nativists seem to assume. Research studies (and informal observation) show that untrained people are quite bad at logic, so perhaps the knowledge is more naturally represented as learned associative pairings (I give-I don’t get-danger!) where the activation of one part activates the others, drawing attention to the potential conflict.

The brain study adds nothing to all this nothingness; if there are differences in cognitive performance as displayed in the behavioral tests, how else might this be manifested but in differences in activity in some brain areas? And if you hold everything constant but the social exchange aspect, where else but in areas of the brain already known to be involved in representing social interactions would you expect to find this differentiated activity?

BTW, I got both problems right; maybe that’s because I have the logic puzzle-solving gene, or maybe it’s because I’ve seen these types of puzzles before.

The logic being checked is a simple “If p then q”, but Carl has omitted the IF from the first question.

The CORRECT answer to the first question is “All four”.

If the question is asked as Michael Gazzaniga does in “The Mind’s Past” P.168:
“Determine whether the following rule has any exceptions. If a card has a D on one side, it has a 3 on the other side.” He also stipulates that all cards have a number on one side and a letter on the other side.

Here is the logic: you only need to check the IF part of the statement ie only if there is an ‘F’ on the letter side of the card do you have to check to see if there is three on the other. The ‘letter’ side of the card may be obscured. A ‘3’ may be coupled with any letter.

IF you omit to stipulate that all cards have a letter on one side and a number on the other, then any of the four cards may have an ‘F’ on one side, but you don’t need to check the ‘3’ card if the ‘IF’ stipulation is made (ie you must check three of the cards).

If you omit the ‘IF’ part of the statement then one must check both the ‘3’ and the ‘F’ to make sure they are coupled correctly with the complimentary ‘F’ or ‘3’ and the other cards to make sure that they are not erroneously coupled with the ‘3’ or ‘F’ ie you must check all four cards.

Carl omitted the ‘IF’ so all four cards must be checked. Unfortunately, Carl has been caught in his own net and has shown that he had not properly understood the underlying logic, therefore the error.

But this is not a too terrible reflection on Carl as Cosmides and Tooby made a similar error – they omitted the explicit stipulation that all cards must have a number on one side and a letter on the other, so the correct answer to the original question as asked (by them) “all but the ‘3’ card”. See their book ‘The Adapted Mind”, Page 182. The roundabout way that the question is asked does not explicitly state that a number must appear on one side and a letter on the other, so F may appear on the other side of the card showing ‘D’.

In general, it is important to ask these questions correctly – there just might be someone with greater insight and intellect than yourself watching. An error in the question will result in a correct answer to the erroneous question but not to the classic problem – highly encephalated individuals don’t like their moderately equipped colleagues pointing the finger at their expense!

Kind regards,
Robert Karl Stonjek

“a card with a D on one side has a 3 on the other side.”

When I did it I did assume that we were supposed to make sure cards with a 3 had as well, i.e. looking for a 3-D card. Rereading the rule after I read the solution I see that I misinterpreted the instructions by making an unwarrented assumption. (You know about assumptions: they make a you know what of you and me.)

With the social example, there is nothing to interpret. I know the rules: an underaged person may not legally have ethanol but can have soda. Anyone twenty-one years or older can legally have the booze but does not have to.

I think it is really clear that this is not a logic problem per se since the actually logic is trivially obvious. It is a communication problem. It is easier to to communicate a problem when people already know the rules. This should not be surprising at all. And this leads to a prediction. If you in subtle manner reworded the second problem so that the adult had to have a beer, people who get the problem wrong in droves.

I’m hoping this is just a poorly explicated Wason Test and not that the Wason Test is crap. =)

I got the first wrong and the second right, as expected. But I got the first question wrong because I picked up on “and you have to make sure that student files for a class have been properly labeled” and inferred that for a student marking system the grade-number correlations must be exclusive – so for the files to be “properly labelled” only the D grade should have a 3 and a 3 should only be applied to a D grade – so you’d have to check all 4 files.

Now the final question doesn’t support this inference, saying just “Pick only the card or cards that you have to turn over to see if any of the files violates the rule.” But I’d argue this is in direct conflict with the first statement explaining the task.

So I don’t know how much the given example demonstrates the supposed evolutionary difference – I think the two problems are not specified identically apart from the social context in one.