Inducing an availability heuristic on the Wason selection task overrides the matching bias

ABSTRACT

A long history of examining reasoning using the Wason selection task has revealed that many respondents are biased towards choices that match the items expressed in the rule. One reason for this particular heuristic may be that no better information is immediately available, and thus matching items win over the competing choice simply via recognition. In two experiments, we sought to examine whether a stronger memory trace could override the matching bias. We created rules from common, easily recognisable nursery rhymes and varied the degree to which the presented rules matched the commonly known rhymes. The components of the remembered rhyme had a strong influence on the participants’ selections, suggesting that a strong memory trace can override the usual matching bias. We provide an interpretation of these results in light of answer fluency, mental models, and probabilistic estimates.

KEYWORDS:

• Reasoning
• availability heuristic
• matching bias
• memory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.