![]() The one variation of this task that people are surprisingly good at getting right is when the rule has to do with cheating and privilege. This isn’t just another "math is hard" story. They also tend to only take college logic classes upon requirement. People are just bad at the Wason selection task. Neither does ensuring that the example is drawn from events and topics with which the subjects are familiar. ![]() The best result I’ve seen is "fewer than 25 percent." Training in formal logic doesn’t seem to help very much. Others replicated the study and got similar results. When Wason first did this study, fewer than 10 percent of his subjects got it right. The rule only says that people going to Boston fly it doesn’t break the rule if someone flies elsewhere. The person might have been flying to Boston, New York, San Francisco, or London. You don’t-as many people think-need to turn over the "took a plane" card to see if it says "went to Boston" because you don’t care. Shifting back to the example, you need to turn over the "went to Boston" card to make sure that person took a plane, and you need to turn over the "took a car" card to make sure that person didn’t go to Boston. The four cards are "P," "not P," "Q," and "not Q." To verify that "if P, then Q" is a valid rule, you have to verify modus ponens by turning over the "P" card and making sure that the reverse says "Q." To verify modus tollens, you turn over the "not Q" card and make sure that the reverse doesn’t say "P." Translating into propositional calculus, there’s the general rule: if P, then Q. On the side facing the subject, they read: "went to Boston," "went to New York," "took a plane," and "took a car." Formal logic states that the rule is violated if someone goes to Boston without taking a plane. For example, the general rule might be, "If a person travels to Boston, then he or she takes a plane." The four cards might correspond to travelers and have a destination on one side and a mode of transport on the other. ![]() The subject is then given a general rule and asked which cards he would have to turn over to ensure that the four people satisfied that rule. Each card represents a person, with each side listing some statement about that person. Subjects are presented with four cards next to each other on a table. Just ask any grad student who has had to teach a formal logic class people have trouble with this.Ĭonsider the Wason selection task. Unsurprisingly, they would have trouble either explaining the rules or using them properly. If I explained this in front of an audience full of normal people, not mathematicians or philosophers, most of them would be lost. If you know "if P, then Q" and "Q," you don’t know anything about "P." And if you know "if P, then Q" and "not P," then you don’t know anything about "Q.") If you know "if P, then Q" and "P," then you know "Q." If you know "if P, then Q" and "not Q," then you know "not P." (The other two similar forms don’t work. This makes sense: if Socrates was not mortal, then he was a demigod or a stone statue or something.īoth are valid forms of logical reasoning. If Socrates was a man, then Socrates was mortal. In other words, if you assume the conditional rule is true, and if you assume the antecedent of that rule is true, then the consequent is true. That sort of thing.) Modus ponens goes like this: If it is raining, then Gwendolyn had Crunchy Wunchies for breakfast. If you are to eat dessert, then you must first eat your vegetables. Both allow you to reason from a statement of the form, "if P, then Q." (If Socrates was a man, then Socrates was mortal. Two particular rules of inference are relevant here: modus ponens and modus tollens. College courses on the subject are taught by either the mathematics or the philosophy department, and they’re not generally considered to be easy classes. It uses variables for statements because the logic works regardless of what the statements are. Propositional calculus is a system for deducing conclusions from true premises. But before we get to the experiment, let’s get into the mathematical background. Back in the 1960s, it was a test of logical reasoning today, it’s used more as a demonstration of evolutionary psychology. Perhaps the most vivid demonstration of this can be seen with variations on what’s known as the Wason selection task, named after the psychologist who first studied it. Once humans became good at cheating, they then had to become good at detecting cheating-otherwise, the social group would fall apart. The evolutionary psychology explanation is that we evolved brain heuristics for the social problems that our prehistoric ancestors had to deal with. Our brains are specially designed to deal with cheating in social exchanges.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |