Reasoning versus text processing in the Wason selection task: A nondeontic perspective on perspective effects

We argue that perspective effects in the Wason four-card selection task are a product of the linguistic interpretation of the rule in the context of the problem text and not of the reasoning process underlying card selection. In three experiments, participants recalled the rule they used in either a selection or a plausibility rating task. The results showed that (1) participants tended to recall rules compatible with their card selection and not with the rule as stated in the problem and (2) recall was not affected by whether or not participants performed card selection. We conclude that perspective effects in the Wason selection task do not concern how card selection is reasoned about but instead reflect the inferential text processing involved in the comprehension of the problem text. Together with earlier research that showed selection performance in nondeontic contexts to be indistinguishable from selection performance in deontic contexts (Almor & Sloman, 1996; Sperber, Cara, & Girotto, 1995), the present results undermine the claim that reasoning in a deontic context elicits specialized cognitive processes.     

四卡问题解决中的视角效应

视角效应是指在四卡问题解决中,当被试从不同的角度来对条件规则进行检验时,其选择偏向会在卡片P,-Q和-P,Q之间发生稳定变化的现象。到目前为止,义务和非义务推理中都发现了该效应的存在,不同的推理理论都试图对此作出解释,却一直存在分歧,其焦点在于视角效应的形成机制是领域特殊性的还是领域一般性的。该文评述了不同的演绎推理理论对视角效应发生机制作出的解释,并且最后总结了该领域目前研究存在的主要争论。     

Why we are so good at catching cheaters

Data that appear to exhibit a 'cheater detection' effect on performance in the Wason Selection task are widely interpreted as implying that deontic reasoning is effected by a domain specific, cognitive module. The 'cheater detection module' is said to offer a clear example of an effect of evolutionary selection on human cognitive architecture. This interpretation depends critically on assuming that deontic conditionals and their indicative controls are identical in structure; hence that the asymmetries in S's performance must be effects of content variables. I argue that this assumption is untrue and that structural features of deontic conditionals predict the 'cheater detection' data without assumptions about either the architecture or the history of cognition. According to this analysis, the putative cheater detection effect on the Wason task is actually a materials artifact.     

Evidence of deontic reasoning in 3- and 4-year-old children

Deontic reasoning is reasoning about what one may, ought, or ought not do in a given set of circumstances. Virtually all of our social institutions and child-rearing practices presume the capacity to reason about deontic concepts, such as what is permitted, obligated, or prohibited. Despite this, very little is known about the development of deontic reasoning. Two experiments were conducted that contrasted children’s reasoning performance on deontic and indicative reasoning tasks (i.e., the reduced array selection version of the Wason card selection task). Like adults, children as young as 3 years of age were found to adopt a violation-detecting strategy more often when reasoning about the deontic case than when reasoning about the indicative case. These results indicate that violation detection emerges as an effective deontic reasoning very early in human development.     

The task-specific nature of domain-general reasoning

This paper develops a theory of how interpretative processes constrain inferential performance on conditional reasoning tasks. Experiment 1 investigated the hypothesis that performance on common reasoning tasks is mediated by different interpretive variables. Necessity and sufficiency relations predicted performance on the conditional arguments task, whereas on the Wason task, performance was predicted by whether the conditional statement instantiated a deontic or a factual relation. Performance on the truth-table task was predicted by both sets of variables. Experiment 2 explored the mapping relation between interpretation, representation, and inference. It was observed that conditional responses to the Wason and arguments tasks were based on different representations of the conditional relationship. These data rule out a simple model of the interplay between interpretation and reasoning in which the interpretation of a statement is driven solely by its content, and instead, indicate that the interpretation of conditional relations is task-specific.     

Concrete problems in the abstract deontic selection task - and how to solve them

The abstract deontic selection task was introduced by Cheng and Holyoak with the aim of demonstrating that people possess abstract reasoning schemas for processing deontic rules about what an individual must, must not, may, or need not do. Solving this task requires people to detect possible rule violators. The average solution rate across several studies, while being substantially higher than that with abstract nondeontic tasks, did not reach the level obtained with concrete deontic tasks. A task analysis based on the deontic principles by Beller uncovers several problems with the formulation of the original task. They concern the presentation of the deontic rule as well as the instructions (focusing on rule following) and result in a specific selection behaviour. Three experiments replicate the difficulties with the original task and show that task performance increases when the formulation problems are resolved. The best performance was obtained with a task that combined a genuine violation detection instruction with a genuine permission rule. Interestingly, permissions are weak deontic rules that, if taken literally, cannot be violated in a deontic sense. Therefore, people must interpret these rules as implying a strong deontic constraint (i.e., a ban), which then constitutes the basis for solving the task. The results provide novel insights into the interpretation of deontic rules and into the role that these content-specific, but abstract, tasks can play for the study of reasoning processes.     

Sharing-rule and detection of free-riders in cooperative groups: Evolutionarily important deontic reasoning in the Wason Selection task

Taking a Darwinian approach, we propose that people reason to detect free-riders on the Wason Selection task with the sharing-rule; If one receives the resource, one is an in-group member (standard), or If one is an in-group member, one receives the resource (switched). As predicted, taking the resource-provider's perspective, both undergraduates and children (11 to 12 years old) checked for the existence of out-group members taking undeserved resource. Changing the perspective to that of the resource-recipient did not alter the selection pattern in undergraduates, although the prediction was that another type of free-riding—failure to share by resource-provider—would be checked as well. However, by removing confounding factors in the materials, both undergraduates and children checked for both types of free-riding, which fully supports the prediction. These results indicate that the sharing-rule elicits a thematic content effect that cannot be explained by preceding deontic reasoning theories.     

Necessity, Sufficiency, and Perspective Effects in Causal Conditional Reasoning

A growing body of research indicates that in causal conditional reasoning, the conclusion that P is necessary for Q is suppressed where alternative conditions for Q are available. Similarly, the conclusion that P is sufficient for Q is suppressed where disabling conditions for P or additional requirements for Q are available. This paper describes experiments in which these factors were used to produce 'perspective effects' in causal contexts that appear identical to the perspective effects found in previous research with deontic tasks. It is therefore proposed that deontic perspective effects are themselves also attributable to the influence of pragmatic factors upon perceived necessity and sufficiency. A generalized theory based on a modification of the mental model theory of deontic reasoning is presented, which accounts for perspective effects across the two domains.     

Why are we good at detecting cheaters? A reply to Fodor

It is argued that the recent criticism by Fodor (Cognition 75 (2000) 29) of "cheater detection" in the Wason selection task is based upon a false presumption about what the task entails. Fodor compares two different ways of presenting the task, rather than two different task domains (social and non-social). Consequently, the conclusion that the selection task can tell us nothing about either the architecture or the history of cognition is invalid. Fodor's explanation of the Wason selection task is examined experimentally and compared to predictions derived from social contract theory (Cognition 31 (1989) 187). It is concluded that, although Fodor's variant of the Wason selection task improves performance, this improvement is independent of the task domain and is insufficient to account for the "cheater detection" effect.     

Deontic Reasoning With Emotional Content: Evolutionary Psychology or Decision Theory?

Three experiments investigated the contrasting predictions of the evolutionary and decision-theoretic approaches to deontic reasoning. Two experiments embedded a hazard management (HM) rule in a social contract scenario that should lead to competition between innate modules. A 3rd experiment used a pure HM task. Threatening material was also introduced into the antecedent, p, of a deontic rule, if p then must q. According to the evolutionary approach, more HM responses (Cosmides & Tooby, 2000) are predicted when p is threatening, whereas decision theory predicts fewer. All 3 experiments were consistent with decision theory. Other theories are discussed, and it is concluded that they cannot account for the behavior observed in these experiments.     

Understanding choice utterances

When individuals offer choices, they intend them to be mandatory (requiring action) or permissive (not requiring action), and they intend them to be open (allowing the choice of both options) or closed (not allowing the choice of both options). In two studies subjects were presented with sets of syntactically equivalent disjunctive sentences with varying content designed to represent four patterns of permitted choice. The research indicates that individuals distinguish four distinct uses of “or” in deontic contexts, and that individuals more often judge choices as mandatory than permissive. The research also compared responses to questions about choice giver intent and receiver choice. The data indicate that when judging intent, individuals are inclined to understand some choices to be permissive. However, when judging what action they might take as choice receiver, subjects tend to regard action to be mandatory. It appears that although people have some facility in assessing a permission giver's intent, they often apply a more restrictive rule to themselves than is required by the choice giver.     

No interpretation without representation: the role of domain-specific representations and inferences in the Wason selection task

The Wason selection task is a tool used to study reasoning about conditional rules. Performance on this task changes systematically when one varies its content, and these content effects have been used to argue that the human cognitive architecture contains a number of domain-specific representation and inference systems, such as social contract algorithms and hazard management systems. Recently, however, Sperber, Cara & Girotto (Sperber, D., Cara, F., & Girotto, V. (1995). Relevance theory explains the selection task. Cognition, 57, 31-95) have proposed that relevance theory can explain performance on the selection task - including all content effects - without invoking inference systems that are content-specialized. Herein, we show that relevance theory alone cannot explain a variety of content effects - effects that were predicted in advance and are parsimoniously explained by theories that invoke domain-specific algorithms for representing and making inferences about (i) social contracts and (ii) reducing risk in hazardous situations. Moreover, although Sperber et al. (1995) were able to use relevance theory to produce some new content effects in other domains, they conducted no experiments involving social exchanges or precautions, and so were unable to determine which - content-specialized algorithms or relevance effects - dominate reasoning when the two conflict. When experiments, reported herein, are constructed so that the different theories predict divergent outcomes, the results support the predictions of social contract theory and hazard management theory, indicating that these inference systems override content-general relevance factors. The fact that social contract and hazard management algorithms provide better explanations for performance in their respective domains does not mean that the content-general logical procedures posited by relevance theory do not exist, or that relevance effects never occur. It does mean, however, that one needs a principled way of explaining which effects will dominate when a set of inputs activate more than one reasoning system. We propose the principle of pre-emptive specificity - that the human cognitive architecture should be designed so that more specialized inference systems pre-empt more general ones whenever the stimuli centrally fit the input conditions of the more specialized system. This principle follows from evolutionary and computational considerations that are common to both relevance theory and the ecological rationality approach.     

道德和习俗领域幼儿义务推理的发展

采用Keller, Gummerum, Wang和Lindsey (2004)的不知情义务推理范式, 探讨了96名4、5、6岁幼儿对通过条件规则表述的鼓励性或禁止性的道德规则、以及习俗规则的义务推理能力的发展。结果表明：1)幼儿对两种不同领域规则的义务推理表现出基本一致的发展规律, 表现出显著的“角色效应”, 即多数幼儿都能指出同伴违反, 随年龄增大指出妈妈违反、双违反的人次百分比逐渐增多, 尤其是一些4岁幼儿就能正确指出道德和习俗领域中的妈妈违反, 部分5岁幼儿即可正确指出双违反。2)在不知情的义务推理范式下, 一些4岁幼儿错误指出本来是妈妈违反约定的情境中同伴违反、一些6岁幼儿错误指出本来是同伴违反约定的鼓励性规则情境中妈妈违反。3)尽管幼儿对道德和习俗规则的义务推理没有差异, 他们对不同性质社会规则的义务推理却表现出显著差异。5、6岁幼儿对禁止性的道德规则中同伴违反的检测显著低于对鼓励性的道德规则, 而6岁幼儿对双违反中妈妈违反的检测则相对更高; 6岁幼儿对习俗规则的义务推理也表现出类似的不同性质之间的差异。这些结果在一定程度上突破了以往的研究结论, 反映出幼儿对道德和习俗规则进行义务推理时表现出的跨领域的一般性及其领域内的特殊性。     

Domain-specific reasoning: social contracts, cheating, and perspective change.

What counts as human rationality: reasoning processes that embody content-independent formal theories, such as propositional logic, or reasoning processes that are well designed for solving important adaptive problems? Most theories of human reasoning have been based on content-independent formal rationality, whereas adaptive reasoning, ecological or evolutionary, has been little explored. We elaborate and test an evolutionary approach. Cosmides' (1989) social contract theory, using the Wason selection task. In the first part, we disentangle the theoretical concept of a "social contract" from that of a "cheater-detection algorithm". We demonstrate that the fact that a rule is perceived as a social contract--or a conditional permission or obligation, as Cheng and Holyoak (1985) proposed--is not sufficient to elicit Cosmides' striking results, which we replicated. The crucial issue is not semantic (the meaning of the rule), but pragmatic: whether a person is cued into the perspective of a party who can be cheated. In the second part, we distinguish between social contracts with bilateral and unilateral cheating options. Perspective change in contracts with bilateral cheating options turns P & not-Q responses into not-P & Q responses. The results strongly support social contract theory, contradict availability theory, and cannot be accounted for by pragmatic reasoning schema theory, which lacks the pragmatic concepts of perspectives and cheating detection.     

Role of responsibility in conditional reasoning

A series of recent studies showed that facilitation on the Wason Selection Task could be produced by perceived utilities. The present work was aimed at testing whether a similar factor could also be involved in human reasoning performance in the context of responsibility. We supposed that the motivation of the subject assuming responsibility is affected by normative goals. These goals prescribe the actions and the results to be achieved, also considering the different social roles. In this experiment the responses of different groups of subjects (N = 270) to a selection task were compared in two different conditions involving different responsibility contexts. The results show that the subjects' strategies in searching for possible violators depended on the condition (responsibility vs no responsibility). In particular, only in the context of responsibility were the performances elicited by conditional rules characterised by a falsification strategy.     

Domains of deontic reasoning: Resolving the discrepancy between the cognitive and moral reasoning literatures

Deontic reasoning has been studied in two subfields of psychology: the cognitive and moral reasoning literatures. These literatures have drawn different conclusions about the nature of deontic reasoning. The consensus within the cognitive reasoning literature is that deontic reasoning is a unitary phenomenon, whereas the consensus within the moral reasoning literature is that there are different subdomains of deontic reasoning. We present evidence from a series of experiments employing the methods of both literatures suggesting that people make a systematic distinction between two types of deontic rule: social contracts and precautions. The results call into question the prevailing opinion in the cognitive reasoning literature and provide further support for both an evolutionary view of deontic reasoning and the more domain-specific perspective found in the moral reasoning literature.     

The logic of social exchange: has natural selection shaped how humans reason? Studies with the Wason selection task

In order to successfully engage in social exchange--cooperation between two or more individuals for mutual benefit--humans must be able to solve a number of complex computational problems, and do so with special efficiency. Following Marr (1982), Cosmides (1985) and Cosmides and Tooby (1989) used evolutionary principles to develop a computational theory of these adaptive problems. Specific hypotheses concerning the structure of the algorithms that govern how humans reason about social exchange were derived from this computational theory. This article presents a series of experiments designed to test these hypotheses, using the Wason selection task, a test of logical reasoning. Part I reports experiments testing social exchange theory against the availability theories of reasoning; Part II reports experiments testing it against Cheng and Holyoak's (1985) permission schema theory. The experimental design included eight critical tests designed to choose between social exchange theory and these other two families of theories; the results of all eight tests support social exchange theory. The hypothesis that the human mind includes cognitive processes specialized for reasoning about social exchange predicts the content effects found in these experiments, and parsimoniously explains those that have already been reported in the literature. The implications of this line of research for a modular view of human reasoning are discussed, as well as the utility of evolutionary biology in the development of computational theories.     

越多接触就越愿意接触?取决于效价与效能

在我国族际背景中, 检验两种效价族际接触的效应及其机制。研究1从内地和新疆抽取有过族际互动经验的维吾尔族和汉族大学生(内地、新疆的汉族、维吾尔族样本量分别为448、791, 375、901), 研究2从宁夏抽取回族和汉族中学生(回族565, 汉族957)。两个研究共在6个样本上检验积极和消极族际接触对族际接触意愿的效应, 并检验族际自我效能的中介作用。结果表明, 积极族际接触明显多于消极族际接触; 积极族际接触越多族际接触意愿越高, 消极族际接触越多族际接触意愿越低, 积极族际接触的促进效应大于消极族际接触的阻碍效应; 族际自我效能部分中介积极族际接触对族际接触意愿的效应, 能更有效的中介消极族际接触的效应; 两种效价族际接触的效应在多数群体和少数群体间总体上没有预期的差异。研究结果对于了解我国族际接触的现状和效应、丰富群际接触研究证据有理论意义, 对于加强各民族交往交流交融具有实践意义。     

员工非伦理行为如何招致同事攻击:道义公正视角

通过整合理性判断与道义公正模型,聚焦非伦理行为实施者被同事攻击的现象,提出员工的非伦理行为导致同事道义不公正,进而引发同事的攻击行为。并且,这个过程分别受到伦理领导的正向影响和任务互依性的负向影响。通过分析265组来自浙江省一家大型制造企业一线员工的双点数据,结果表明同事道义不公正在员工非伦理行为与其被同事攻击之间起到了中介作用;伦理领导正向调节了非伦理行为对同事道义不公正的影响,即伦理领导增强了员工非伦理行为对同事道义不公正的正向作用,从而导致同事攻击行为的产生;任务互依性负向调节了同事道义不公正与攻击行为之间的正向关系,并且减弱了同事道义不公正在员工非伦理行为与攻击行为之间的中介作用。研究结果为控制和预防职场非伦理行为提供了理论依据和实践启示。     

Social roles and utilities in reasoning with deontic conditionals

A set of experiments is reported in which a new formulation of deontic thinking is tested. This is that people represent subjective utilities inherent in conforming to or violating deontic statements, along with the social dynamics of these statements. The experiments used Wason's selection task and tested people's understanding of conditional permission. In the first two experiments, familiar scenarios referring to family interactions were used. In the third, an imaginary business content was used. In both cases it was apparent that people's thinking depended on their representation of the utilities associated with the agent of a permission statement (the party who lays down the rule) and the actor (the party whose behaviour is its target). The results are discussed as favouring an explanation in terms of mental models, rather than the schema theories which have dominated this field hitherto.