The Wason Selection Task, Part I

The Pope, a nun, Kermit the Frog, and Bruce Lee are all sitting at a bar. Well, actually it's just four people, represented by the cards below.


Each person has an age and a drink type, but you can see only one of these for each person. Here is a rule: "every person that has an alcoholic drink is of legal age (21)." Your task is to select all those people, but only those people, that you would have to check in order to discover whether or not the rule has been violated.

Most people have little trouble picking the correct answer above. But, "across a wide range of published literature only around 10% of the general population" finds the correct answer to the infamous Wason selection task shown below:

Each card has a letter on one side and a number on the other, but you can see only one of these for each card. Here is a rule: "every card that has a D on one side has a 3 on the other." Your task is to select all those cards, but only those cards, which you would have to turn over in order to discover whether or not the rule has been violated.

In fact, Matthew Inglis and Adrian Simpson (2004) found that mathematics undergraduates as well as mathematics academic staff, though performing significantly better than history undergraduates, performed unexpectedly poorly on the task, with only 29% of math undergrads and a shocking 43% of staff finding the correct answer.

All of this leads to some interesting ideas, which I'll get to in a future post.

Reference: Inglis, M. & Simpson, A. Mathematicians and the Selection Task. Proceedings of the 28th Conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, 2004. (3) 89-96.

Wason Task: Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI

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