Darwinian algorithms and the Wason selection task: A factorial analysis of social contract selection task problems

Selective impairment of reasoning about social exchange in a patient with bilateral limbic system damage

“…1.) This spike in performance when the conditional is a social contract has been found widely in industrialized nations (8)(9)(10)(11)17) and, in the accompanying paper, recently has been observed even among isolated, nonliterate hunter-horticulturalists (18). Cognitive experiments have demonstrated that the activation of this heightened performance is sensitively regulated by the series of variables expected if this were a system whose function were to reason specifically about social exchange, rather than about a broader class of contents (8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13)18).…”

“…Rules with abstract or descriptive contentconditionals describing some state of the world-typically elicit a correct response (P and not-Q) from only 5-30% of subjects tested. This finding is robust: performance in normal subjects remains at these low levels even when the rules tested are familiar, or when subjects are trained, taught logic, or given incentives (8)(9)(10)(14)(15)(16). In contrast, 65-80% of subjects give correct responses when the conditional rule expresses a social contract, and a violation represents cheating, even on culturally unfamiliar rules (8)(9)(10)(11).…”

“…Research on conditional reasoning has provided evidence that the human mind contains processes specialized for detecting cheaters (8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13). Reasoning was a useful avenue for investigating the psychology of social exchange, because social exchange involves a conditional: If A provides a requested benefit to or meets the requirement of B, then B will provide a rationed benefit to A.…”

Model theory of deduction: a unified computational approach

“…Cheng, Holyoak and colleagues postulate, for the case of reasoning with the conditional connective, the existence of abstract knowledge structures such as causation, obligation and permission (Cheng & Holyoak, 1985;Cheng, Holyoak, Nisbett & Oliver, 1986). As far as conditional reasoning is concerned, it has also been claimed that there exist cognitive procedures specialized for reasoning about social situations and specific types of adaptive problems (Cosmides & Tooby, 1994;Gigerenzer & Hug, 1992;Platt & Griggs, 1993). In a radically alternative view, Pollard (1981) and Griggs and Cox (1982) propose that the specific experiences encoded in the memory of the system are the only determinants of such reasoning processes.…”

“…Stenning and Oberlander (1995) classify the mixture of linguistic and graphical representations as limited abstraction representational systems. 7. and Platt and Griggs (1993) criticize MMT, noting that it does not explain how the process of fleshing out the implicit information is triggered. Here, we make it explicit that the process of fleshing out is triggered by a failure either in the Integration or in the Falsification phase.…”