Deductive Reasoning: Syllogisms and Logic • 365Four cards are shown in ● Figure 13.4. Each card has an age on one side and the name of
a beverage on the other side. Imagine you are a police offi cer who is applying the rule “If a
person is drinking beer, then he or she must be over 19 years old.” (The participants in this
experiment were from Florida, where the drinking age was 19 at the time.) Which of the
cards in Figure 13.4 must be turned over to determine whether the rule is being followed?This beer/drinking-age version of Wason’s problem is identi-
cal to the abstract version except that concrete everyday terms
(beer, soda, and ages) are substituted for the letters and num-
bers. Griggs and Cox found that for this version of the problem,
73 percent of their participants provided the correct response:
It is necessary to turn over the “beer” and the “16 years” cards.
In contrast, none of their participants answered the abstract
task correctly (Figure 13.3b). Why is the concrete task easier
than the abstract task? Apparently, being able to relate the beer
task to regulations about drinking makes it easier to realize that
the “16 years” card must be turned over. (See Johnson-Laird
et al., 1972, for another example of a “real world” version of the
Wason problem.)The Role of “Permissions” in the Wason Task Patricia Cheng and Keith Holyoak
(1985) took the Wason task a step further by proposing the concept of pragmatic rea-
soning schemas. A pragmatic reasoning schema is a way of thinking about cause and
effect in the world that is learned as part of experiencing everyday life. An example is
the permission schema that states that if a person satisfi es condition A (such as being
the legal age for drinking), then he or she gets to carry out action B (being served alco-
hol). The permission schema “If you are 19, then you get to drink beer” is something
that most of the participants in this experiment had learned, so they were able to apply
that schema to the card task.
This idea that people apply a real-life schema like the permission schema to the card task
makes it easier to understand the difference between the abstract version of the card task
and the beer/drinking-age version. With the abstract task, the goal is to indicate whether an
abstract statement about letters and numbers is true. But in the beer/drinking-age task, the
goal is to be sure that a person has permission to drink alcohol. Apparently, activating the
permission schema helps people focus attention on the card that would test that schema.
Participants’ attention is attracted to the “16 years old” card because they know that “beer”
on the other side would be violating the rule that a person must be 19 years old to drink.TABLE 13.2 Outcomes of Turning Over Each Card in the Wason TaskThe rule:
If there is a vowel on one side,
then there is an even number on the other side.If turn over... And the result is... Then this the ruleE
EEven
Oddconfi rms
falsifi es
K
KEven
Oddis irrelevant to *
is irrelevant to
4
4Vowel
Consonantconfi rms
is irrelevant to
7
7Vowel
Consonantfalsifi es
is irrelevant to* This outcome of turning over the card is irrelevant because the rule does not say anything about what should be on the
card if a consonant is on one side. Similar reasoning holds for all of the other irrelevant cases.Beer Soda
16
years
oldIf drinking beer, then over 19 years old.
24
years
old●FIGURE 13.4 The beer/drinking-age version of the four-
card problem. (Source: Based on R. A. Griggs & J. R. Cox, “The Elusive
Thematic-Materials Eff ect in Wason’s Abstract Selection Task,” British Journal
of Psychology, 73, 407–420, 1982.)
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