Exploring the Role of Deontic Reasoning and World Knowledge in Wason´s Selection Task

The goal of the presented protocol is to examine the role of semantic and pragmatic variables in reasoning, using Wason´s selection task, devised by Peter Wason in the 1960s. This problem was designed to investigate how people test hypotheses and make inferences from if-then conditional statements. This author has been considered the founder of a new era in the psychology of reasoning. In this sense, the traditional idea was challenged that subjects reasoned by logical processes, and it was shown that reasoning was content-dependent. From the sixties until now, numerous investigations have revealed that better results were obtained with the initial thematic tasks compared to the original abstract problem, which could be due to other factors, such as the scenario or the task instructions. Specifically, in this study, three variables are manipulated: type of thematic content (permission, obligation, neutral), framing (including normative deontic rules or indicative conditionals about factual relations), and scenario (a context was provided or not). Results showing the key role of thematic content of the rule, the scenario, and the deontic framing on subjects´ inferences are presented. More precisely: (1) highest performance was registered in rules expressing a permission and the worst reasoning was observed when there wasn´t relationship between antecedent-consequent of the rule: neutral content; (2) reasoning was considerably better when the scenario was present versus when the scenario was absent; (3) significant interaction between scenario and framing was registered: performance was significantly higher if the task was included in a scenario when deontic framing was presented. Finally, this investigation has highlighted the importance of deontic reasoning and empirical knowledge in reasoning with the selection task. Consequently, the results obtained seem to reflect the dynamic and flexible nature of human reasoning.