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The Wason selection task is one of the most famous tasks in the study of deductive reasoning. Here is the task:
You are shown a set of four cards placed on a table, each of which has a number on one side and a colored patch on the other side. The visible faces of the cards show 3, 8, red and brown. Which card(s) must you turn over in order to test the truth of the proposition that if a card shows an even number on one face, then its opposite face is red?
note: if there is any ambiguity, you need to turn over only those cards that will test the truth of the rule.
![[image loading]](http://s22.postimg.org/y80y8mfwh/350px_Wason_selection_task_cards_svg.png)
Answer:
+ Show Spoiler +The correct response is to turn over only the 8 and brown cards.
The rule was "If the card shows an even number on one face, then its opposite face is red." Only a card with both an even number on one face and something other than red on the other face can invalidate this rule:
If the 3 card is red (or brown), that doesn't violate the rule.
If the 8 card is brown, that violates the rule.
If the red card is odd (or even), that doesn't violate the rule.
If the brown card is even, that violates the rule.
Though the task looks pretty simple, only around 10% answer it correctly. Wonder what the TL average will be.
Poll: Did you answer it correctly?Yes (27) 71% no (11) 29% 38 total votes Your vote: Did you answer it correctly? (Vote): Yes
(Vote): no
  
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I'm horrible at things like this but that wasn't very hard 
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really what this studies is the ability to abstract, it becomes much easier when you replace the numbers and colors with real life examples
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Starcraft makes you smarter 
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This is just a logic test. It's testing your ability to understand necessary and sufficient conditions in a conditional statement. So you have to know that a card having an even number MUST imply that its back is red, but not the other way around. So you have to turn over the even 8 to check that its back is red. And you have to turn over the brown card to make sure that its number is not even (since its supposed to be red if it's even).
But you don't have to turn over the 3 because the proposition never ruled out odd numbers being red. And you don't have to turn over the red card because, again, the proposition never said that odd numbers can't be red.
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"The importance of the experiment is not in justifying one answer of the ambiguous problem, but in demonstrating the inconsistency of applying the logical rules by the people when the problem is set in two different contexts but with very similar connection between the facts."
It's not a very interesting puzzle imo, but a cool study :D I had not seen it before.
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On January 07 2014 04:18 tili wrote:Starcraft makes you smarter
Or smart people are more likely to play starcraft 
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On January 07 2014 04:09 sam!zdat wrote:
really what this studies is the ability to abstract, it becomes much easier when you replace the numbers and colors with real life examples
People get this wrong in real-life contexts all the time.
Apparently the main exception is social norms. If the rule is: "You can't drink alcohol if you're 20 or younger", no one wants to check who the orange juice belongs to
At least that's what I think I read in an intro to psychology textbook years ago.
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I was just reading some anthropological literature about this. It definitely changes a lot when you use real examples, people still miss is though
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On January 07 2014 06:29 sam!zdat wrote:
I was just reading some anthropological literature about this. It definitely changes a lot when you use real examples, people still miss is though
Paraphrase from a book about math I'm reading.
It might be hard for people to tell you whether 2/3 is bigger than 3/5 but if you ask an alcoholic which is better, 2 bottles of vodka for 3 people or 3 bottles for 5 people, he can tell you the answer right away.
Contextualizing questions to people's daily lives makes them a lot easier most of the time. This has also been proposed as the reason why minorities do disproportionately badly on standardized tests like the SAT. The situations in the questions are contextualized to the daily lives of the white (and asian), upper middle class population who score highest by far on the exam.
edit: Also, the more interesting conclusion for this puzzle is not whehter or not people can do logic, but how people parse english into logical statements. For example, usually when you tell people "A or B is true", they interpret it to "A or B, but not both". Or when you say A -> B, they usually add in B -> A even if you didn't state it (as in the above example).
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On January 07 2014 13:40 packrat386 wrote:Show nested quote +On January 07 2014 06:29 sam!zdat wrote:
I was just reading some anthropological literature about this. It definitely changes a lot when you use real examples, people still miss is though Paraphrase from a book about math I'm reading. It might be hard for people to tell you whether 2/3 is bigger than 3/5 but if you ask an alcoholic which is better, 2 bottles of vodka for 3 people or 3 bottles for 5 people, he can tell you the answer right away. Contextualizing questions to people's daily lives makes them a lot easier most of the time. This has also been proposed as the reason why minorities do disproportionately badly on standardized tests like the SAT. The situations in the questions are contextualized to the daily lives of the white (and asian), upper middle class population who score highest by far on the exam. edit: Also, the more interesting conclusion for this puzzle is not whehter or not people can do logic, but how people parse english into logical statements. For example, usually when you tell people "A or B is true", they interpret it to "A or B, but not both". Or when you say A -> B, they usually add in B -> A even if you didn't state it (as in the above example).
I'm not really into formal logic or the psychology behind it but I believe the source of confusion is the ambiguity of if statements. For example lots of if statements are reversible: if a+b=c then a=c-b, meaning they are equivalent. This relationship is much easier to understand then the sequencial relationship (and probably much easier to code for on a neurological level), so people would be biased to use it. To understand and use sequencial relationships one should have sufficient practice with it. I think if some other language had different ways of coding for sequencial and equivalent statements then there would have been far less errors during this task.
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EPT
