magfrump comments on Psychopathy and the Wason Selection Task - Less Wrong

18 Post author: hegemonicon 22 November 2010 02:00PM

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Comment author: ideclarecrockerrules 22 November 2010 03:40:30PM 6 points [-]

when framed in terms of social interactions, people's performance dramatically improves

From the Wikipedia article, after invoking evolutionary psychology and social interaction to explain the improvement:

Alternatively, it could just mean that there are some linguistic contexts in which people tend to interpret "if" as a material conditional, and other linguistic contexts in which its most common vernacular meaning is different.

It shouldn't be hard to present the test as a real world example that doesn't involve social interaction (e.g. "If lights are on, there is electricity in the house").

/me goes off to test this on a couple of linguistics students

Result: One correct and one incorrect answer.

Comment author: magfrump 23 November 2010 05:50:28AM 3 points [-]

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?

Comment author: ideclarecrockerrules 23 November 2010 01:04:19PM 3 points [-]

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:

  • Made four cards out of paper, drew a lightning bolt, a light bulb, a crossed-out lightning bolt and a crossed-out light bulb. Back of the cards was empty.
  • Presented the cards as houses - one side specifies if lights are on, other specifies if there is electricity.
  • Told them that "if lights are on, there must be electricity in the house" and individually asked which house(s) they must check (flip) to see if any of them are impossible.

This isn't a good test. I'd much rather go for something more primal, such as "If you don't eat, you will die".

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