Survey - Page 2

From some previous surveys, it seems that while people are generally good with reasoning via modus ponens, there is a larger tendency to fail when applying modus tollens, especially when the question involved some real life situation which people may have created a model for. In this case it seems likely that people associate not only smiling with being happy, but also other signs as well, so despite reading the given information and working based on that, they fall back upon the previously mentioned mental associations which make up their mental representation. That is, reason is not their first choice of thinking method, but rather whatever mental representations/associations are most relevant to the question at hand. Thus they would answer that yes, it is possible, whereas the answer is clearly no by a logical examination of the question. Moreover, if this were true, one could expect a larger percentage of people to say yes in the 2nd version which has more stuff in it, since it includes a possible mental association, which may cause people to go with their familiar mental associations rather than view it logically, despite the clear logical format of the original statement. Of course, to see whether or not the change is directly related to mental representations being used is not only dependent on the percentage of yes/no answers, but also upon the question itself; how large would the change be if the question specified were not something with a strong pre-existing mental representation, but something more abstract, like some abstract mathematical statement which nevertheless uses a simple modus tollens form, but has what sounds plausible (yet must be diregarded as having been excluded by the original if-then statement itself).

tl;dr: I'm wondering if people really have a bad sense of logic, and in this and future surveys (the results of which I will post after they are done), I want to see how much heuristics are being used.

I guess I am an Idiot LOL, wasn't thinking correctly/logically at the time I answered yes to the first question

Yes, but your absolute mathematical way of approaching this problem and view of the premises as "absolute edicts" and not pondering the very real possibility that the two scenarios could exist for question 2 could be what the surveyer is truly testing. Whether there are more philosophical or mathematical people; or something like that.

actually a lot of people don't think logically, which is rather interesting. It's as if the mind were using some sort of relational representation instead, which includes some of the logical relationships but not all of them.

I am actually a very logical and mathematical person myself (Enjoying first year Engineering in uni atm), I really think I was blanked out when I was reading the question.

I answered question 1 so I had it easier. Then I read question 2, obviously saw the trick since I had read question 1 before, but I'm sure I wouldn't have fallen for it anyway.

For #1, 36 out of 73 wrong. For #2, 17 out of 34 wrong.