Speak your mind and I will make it right: the case of “selection task”

ABSTRACT

The “Wason selection task” is still one of the most studied tasks in cognitive psychology. We argue that the low performance originally obtained seems to be caused by how the information of the task is presented. By systematically manipulating the task instructions, making explicit the information that participants are required to infer in accordance with the logical interpretation of the material implication “if, then”, we found an improvement in performance. In Experiment 1, the conditional rule has been formulated within a relevant context and in accordance with the conversational rules of communication, hence transmitting the actual meaning of the material implication. In Experiment 2, a similar improvement has been obtained even without the realistic scenario, only by making explicit the unidirectionality of the material implication. We conclude that task instructions are often formulate neglecting the conversational rules of communication, and this greatly reduces the possibility to succeed in the task.

KEYWORDS:

• Selection task
• pragmatic approach
• psychoretorical approach
• logic
• natural language

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Miriam A. G. Franchella http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2285-5096

Notes

1 The original task was presented in lire, which correspond to the postage value in Italy in the early 70 s.

2 If a card has the letter A on one side then it has the number 3 on the other side (first rule).

3 If a card has the letter L on one side then it has the number 3 on the other side (second rule with one alternative antecedent); If a card has the letter L or the letter P on one side then it has the number 3 on the other side (second rule with two alternative antecedents).

4 The explicated rule with the violation instructions was:

A card with a vowel on it can only have an even number, but a card with a consonant on it can have either an even or an odd number. Your task is to decide which card or cards must be turned over in order to find out whether or not the rule is being violated.

5 The explicated rule with the true-false instruction was:

A card with a vowel on it can only have an even number, but a card with a consonant on it can have either an even or an odd number. Your task is to decide which card or cards must be turned over in order to find out whether the rule is true or false.

6 The original task was presented in lire, which correspond to the postage value in Italy in the early 70 s.

7 According to Beller and Spada (2003) the interpretation of Ahn and Graham’s (1999) results is not straightforward, as the tasks contained two conditionals, thus modifying the usual structure.

8 The original experiment was presented in Italian (see Appendix for full text): “controlla che [le carte] siano state fabbricate senza difetti”.

9 Original text: “Se la carta è di cerchi allora il retro è rosso”.

10 Original text: “mentre se la carta è di quadrati allora il retro può essere indifferentemente rosso o blu”.

11 Original text: “Sei un operaio che lavora in una fabbrica di carte da gioco […]. Parte del tuo lavoro è controllare che le carte siano fabbricate nel modo corretto”.

12 Original text: “non necessariamente viceversa”.

13 It would be interesting to further analyze all 16 selection patterns (reported in Appendix B) since we only focused on comparing the correct answer (p and not-q) with the wrong answers (all other selection).