Wason selection task

In particular, researchers have found that the puzzle is readily solved when the imagined context is policing a social rule.

The non-logical inferences made by the participants from this experiment demonstrate the possibility and structure of extra logical reasoning mechanisms.

[12]Wason also ascribes participants' errors on this selection task due to confirmation bias.

[14] Evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (1992) identified that the selection task tends to produce the "correct" response when presented in a context of social relations.

[14] According to Cosmides and Tooby, this experimental evidence supports the hypothesis that a Wason task proves to be easier if the rule to be tested is one of social exchange (in order to receive benefit X you need to fulfill condition Y) and the subject is asked to police the rule, but is more difficult otherwise.

They argued that such a distinction, if empirically borne out, would support the contention of evolutionary psychologists that human reasoning is governed by context-sensitive mechanisms that have evolved, through natural selection, to solve specific problems of social interaction, rather than context-free, general-purpose mechanisms.

[11][16][17] However, in response to Kanazawa (2010),[18] Kaufman et al. (2011) gave 112 subjects a 70-item computerized version of the contextualized Wason card-selection task proposed by Cosmides and Tooby (1992) and found instead that "performance on non-arbitrary, evolutionarily familiar problems is more strongly related to general intelligence than performance on arbitrary, evolutionarily novel problems",[19] and writing for Psychology Today, Kaufman concluded instead that "It seems that general intelligence is very much compatible with evolutionary psychology.