China
Africa
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
Psychological Experiments
Published in Stephen Hester, David Francis, Eric Livingston, Ethnographies of Reason, 2016
Stephen Hester, David Francis, Eric Livingston
This chapter reviews a number of psychological experiments on reasoning. They come from two related but different research traditions. Experiments 2 and 3 concern the “Wason Selection Task,” reputedly “the most intensively researched single problem in the history of the psychology of reasoning.”1 These experiments attempt to examine the circumstances in which people’s reasoning follows the canons of deductive logic. Experiments 1 and 4 come from the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Their research focuses more on explaining why people reason the way that they do reason, particularly under conditions of uncertainty.2
Learning Logic: examining the effects of context ordering on reasoning about conditionals
Published in International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology, 2020
Christina W. Lommatsch, Patricia S. Moyer-Packenham
Abstract context conditionals are defined as conditionals where a learner has no prior knowledge that may influence their ability to correctly reason about the conditional (Wason, 1968). The most well-known study related to reasoning about conditionals is the Wason Selection Task, proposed and administered by P. C. Wason in 1966. The Selection Task asks participants to consider four envelopes, laid flat, that have a letter on one side and a number on the other. The researcher asked participants to ‘select just the envelopes that definitely needed to be turned over to find out whether they violate the rule’ from the four envelopes labelled ‘D’, ‘C’, ‘5’ and ‘4’ (Wason, 1968). The rule, that is the conditional, proposed was ‘If an envelope has a D on one side, then it has a 5 on the other side’ (Wason, 1968). Wason found that less than 10% of the undergraduate participants correctly chose both D (the correct solution for direct reasoning) and 4 (the correct solution for contrapositive reasoning). Nearly all participants correctly selected D, however, it was the second card, 4, which would validate the contrapositive of the statement, that most participants failed to select. The Selection Task requires participants to reason about two different logical structures, direct reasoning and contrapositive reasoning, with each of these placed in an abstract context. This means that a participant would have no prior knowledge which could influence their reasoning about the conditional. Studying participants’ responses to this abstract conditional clearly showed that participants had not naturally developed some aspects of reasoning about the conditionals. However, Wagner-Egger (Wagner-Egger, 2007) found that, when college students were presented with a question equivalent to the Wason Selection Task, that was situated in a different context (intuitive) where they could use prior knowledge to aid their contrapositive reasoning, participants performed significantly better than they had on the Wason Selection Task. This demonstrates that, while the Wason Selection Task may measure a participant's ability to reason about a conditional in an abstract context, it fails to generalize to a participants’ ability to reason about a conditional in other contexts, such as the intuitive context tested by Wagner-Egger.