Peter Cathcart Wason

He also coined the term "confirmation bias"[1] to describe the tendency for people to immediately favor information that validates their preconceptions, hypotheses and personal beliefs regardless of whether they are true or not.

[3] Wason married Marjorie Vera Salberg in 1951, and the couple had two children, Armorer and Sarah.

[3] Wason returned home in 1945, having been released from his duties as an officer due to extreme injuries.

[2] Much of Peter Wason's first areas of experimentation was not in the field of psychology of reasoning, but language and psycholinguistics.

With Susan Carey[5] at the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies, Wason found that context affects comprehension of an utterance, measured in time taken to respond.

Wason argued against this logicism, saying that humans are unable to reason, and quite frequently fall prey to biases.

The THOG task required subjects to carry out a combinational analysis, a feat an adult should be able to accomplish, using reason and logic.

Although he had some assistants, he insisted on being present when experiments were run, so he could actively watch the behaviour of the subjects throughout the process.

It is also said that Wason infused a clinical psychology atmosphere into his study by asking his subjects how they felt about the experiment itself, as well as the results delivered.

Wason's goal was to discover new psychological phenomena and new aspects of human behaviour, and not only to test his own hypotheses.