Concrete problems in the abstract deontic selection task—And how to solve them

Abstract

The abstract deontic selection task was introduced by Cheng and Holyoak with the aim of demonstrating that people possess abstract reasoning schemas for processing deontic rules about what an individual must, must not, may, or need not do. Solving this task requires people to detect possible rule violators. The average solution rate across several studies, while being substantially higher than that with abstract nondeontic tasks, did not reach the level obtained with concrete deontic tasks. A task analysis based on the deontic principles by Beller uncovers several problems with the formulation of the original task. They concern the presentation of the deontic rule as well as the instructions (focusing on rule following) and result in a specific selection behaviour. Three experiments replicate the difficulties with the original task and show that task performance increases when the formulation problems are resolved. The best performance was obtained with a task that combined a genuine violation detection instruction with a genuine permission rule. Interestingly, permissions are weak deontic rules that, if taken literally, cannot be violated in a deontic sense. Therefore, people must interpret these rules as implying a strong deontic constraint (i.e., a ban), which then constitutes the basis for solving the task. The results provide novel insights into the interpretation of deontic rules and into the role that these content-specific, but abstract, tasks can play for the study of reasoning processes.

Keywords:

• Deontic selection task
• Deontic reasoning
• Social rules
• Basic representational principles
• Pragmatic schemas

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Andrea Bender, Lukas Bischof, Miriam Hansen, Gregory Kuhnmünch, and Nikol Rummel for helping with data collection, and to Andrea Bender and Lisa Hüther, as well as to Keith Holyoak and a second, anonymous reviewer for valuable comments on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

¹The original regulation “If one is to take action A, then one must first satisfy precondition P” corresponds to such a backward factual-to-deontic inference from Ban B and is thus deontically justified: If the deontically regulated action “A” is taken, then the condition under which this action is allowed (“P”) must be fulfilled, as otherwise the regulation would be violated.

²Please note that the distinction between testing rule violation versus rule following is different from the distinction between testing rule violation versus the truth of a rule, which was compared in several former studies on instruction effects (e.g., Chrostowski & Griggs, 1985; Griggs, 1984; Yachanin, 1986). Whereas the truth conditions of a deontic rule cannot be determined in a deontic selection task that only provides information on people's behaviour, rule violation and rule following can (Beller, 2010, p. 127).

³Please note that, in relation to the conditional statements above, the deontic case of rule violation (“A & not-P”) does not correspond to the “logical” violation of the conditional statements (true antecedent and false consequence).

⁴Similar principles were found to guide the representation of two other domains as well—namely, causal relations (Beller & Kuhnmünch, 2007; Beller & Spada, 2003; Kuhnmünch & Beller, 2005) and conditional promises and threats (Beller, Bender, & Kuhnmünch, 2005; Beller, Bender, & Song, 2009; Beller & Spada, 2003).