Do people think logically? Answer this question by describing the results of Wason selection task experiments.

Do people think logically? Answer this question by describing the results of Wason selection task experiments.

Wason's experiments with the inductuve reasoning tasks have indicated that we typically show a confirmation bias when asked to discover a rule. From one of his experiments (four-card problem we solved during the lecture), which contains the cards E,K,4,7 we can see that in order to be sure that ''if there is a vowel on one side, then there is an even number on the other side'', we must turn over the E. It is because if there is an odd number on the other side, it would prove the rule to be false.

Another experiment in which Griggs and Cox tested participants with the beer/drinking age version of Wason's problem; identical to the abstract version with the difference of applying concrete every day terms. In this problem 73% of participants provided the correct answer. When given the cards |Beer|Soda|16yrs old|24yrs old| with the instructions that ''if a person is drinking beer, then he or she must be over 19 years old''; people knew that it is necessary to turn over the ''beer'' and the ''16 years'' cards. In contrast with the abstract task where non of the participants answered it correctly.

It turns out that ''in a variety of tasks reasoners have been shown to spend the majority of their efforts trying to confirm a rule that they believe to be correct as opposed to trying to disconfirm it''. In much of the cases as the research on deductive reasonng has shown that we ignore the logical connection between statements but rather focus on the truth or falsity of individual statements.