Two results isn't enough to get a hold of probabilities like 40% and 70%; can we get ten linguistics students surveyed? I know three and could test them. Can you describe the test in more detail?
Yeah, I expected someone to point out a paper where this has been done (online Wikipedia references don't have it and I couldn't find the papers Ermer cited).
The paper presents good evidence in favor of its hypothesis, but I am more interested if ordinary people really do logic better in social context as opposed to other real-world tasks.
As for the test:
The Wason Selection Task is the somewhat famous experimental problem that requires attempting to falsify a hypothesis in order to get the correct answer. From the wikipedia article:
Aside from an illustration of the rampancy of confirmation bias (only 10-20% of people get it right), the task is interesting for another reason: when framed in terms of social interactions, people's performance dramatically improves:
However, apparently psychopaths perform nearly as badly on the "social contract" versions of this experiment as they do on the normal one. From the Economist:
The original (gated) research appears to be here.