The overall goal of the Wason selection task is to analyze how subjects formulate and test hypotheses from a conditional "If p then q" rule. This problem has been and continues to be one of the best experimental tools for studying the mechanisms underlying human reasoning. The original abstract version of the problem1 is illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Abstract version of Wason´s selection task. Please click here to view a larger version of this figure.
From a logical point of view, a conditional statement if p then q, should be interpreted as a material implication, in a unidirectional sense. So, the correct solution is to select for turning over the A card and the card showing 7 (in general terms, p and not-q cards). The A card (p) should be selected because 3 (q) on the other side would confirm the rule, whereas 7 (not-q) on the other side would falsify the rule. The card showing 7 (not-q) should be chosen because it would falsify the rule if A (p) were on the other side.
In this abstract version (known as indicative), the first success rates from a formal point of view were extremely poor (around 10%). Most subjects systematically committed one of the following mistakes: they selected the card that represented the antecedent of the rule (A, or p card). Moreover, they frequently failed to select 7 (or not q), choosing the 3 (q card) instead. So participants tried to prove the conditional rule rather than falsify it (verification bias2). Another bias consisted of selecting those cards which were mentioned in the rule: A and 3; in general, p and q cards (matching bias3,4).
A question arises as to why intelligent adult subjects fail to solve it. The initial hypothesis of these results has been related to the abstract nature of the task (participants had to reason with letters and numbers). As a result, researchers soon started looking for thematic variations of the original problem, and initially, they registered better performance. The first explanations revolved around the so-called thematic facilitation effect5,6,7,8. Nevertheless, the following questions arise: (1) could these new specific versions of the original task affect the results obtained?, (2) Is subjects´ reasoning about the thematic problems different from the original abstract one?, (3) What´s more, are there different selection tasks?
One of the first semantic versions of the problem was based on a "postal rule" and it was designed by Johnson-Laird et al.9. In this task, subjects received the conditional sentence: "If a letter is sealed, then it has a 50 L stamp on it". Better results obtained in this version with respect to the original abstract were initially explained in terms of the thematic facilitation effect. However, in this new problem, some changes were included with respect to the first task, which were not considered at the time. These modifications could also modulate the results obtained in addition to the thematic content. Firstly, the postal task was included in a specific scenario (subjects were asked to imagine that they were post office workers sorting letters). Secondly, they were instructed "to select those envelopes that they definitely need to turn over to find out whether or not they violate the rule" (violation instructions). So, the experimental instructions were also changed with respect to the original true/false instructions10,11,12,13,14,15for some key investigations on the effect of instructions and thematic content on reasoning with the selection task.
In the same way, one of the thematic versions in which the highest percentages of correct responses were recorded was designed by Griggs and Cox16. In this problem, subjects had to imagine that they were police officers, and they had to check if the rule presented had been violated ("If a person is drinking beer, then the person must be over 19 years of age"). Specifically, in previous research, it has also been shown that the importance of the scenario and the experimental instructions on reasoning with the selection task17,18,19). In fact, if the research with the selection task is reviewed, it can be seen that an important part of the designed tasks that registered facilitation included deontic rules instead of the original indicative task20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29(see Table 1).
| Authors | Rule-Example | Result-Explanation |
| Johnson-Laird, Legrenzi & Legrenzi (1972)9 | “If a letter is sealed, then it has a 50 lire stamp on it” | Thematic facilitation effect |
| Grigs & Cox (1982)16 | “If a person is drinking beer, then the person must be over 19 years of age” | Facilitation by content-experience relationship. |
| Cheng & Holyoak (1985)20 | “If a passenger’s form says ‘Entering’ on one side, then the other side must include ‘cholera’.” | Facilitation by activation of permission rules. |
| Cosmides (1989)21 | “If a man eats cassava root, then he has a tattoo on his face” | Facilitation by reformulation of the rule as cost-benefit and application of cheater-detector algorithm. |
| Manktelow & Over (1991)22 | “If you tidy up your room, then you may go out to play” | Selection of cards which break the rule: Child: “p & not-q”; mother: “not-p & q”. |
| Gigerenzer & Hug (1992)23 | “If an employee works on the weekend, then that person gets a day off during the week” | Perspective effect and cheater-detector algorithm modulate the selection (employee: “p & not-q”; employer: “not-p & q”). |
| Love & Kessler (1995)24 | “If there are Xow, then there must be a force field” | Interactive effect instructions and content. Better performance in deontic versions. |
| Valiña, Seoane, Ferraces & Martín (1995)18 | “If a person is sitting in the front seat of a car, then that person must be over 12 years of age” | Better performance in thematic version. Facilitation of violation instructions. Individual differences. |
| Valiña, Seoane, Ferraces & Martín (1998)19 | “If a person is riding a motorbyke then he must wear a helmet” | Interactive effect instructions and content. Better performance in deontic versions. |
| Almor & Sloman (2000)25 | “If an employee gets a day off during the week, then that employee must have worked on the weekend” | Perspective effects depends on the linguistic interpretation of the rule in the context of the problem text. |
| Staller, Sloman & Ben-Zeev (2000)26 | “If a Hare Mantra child is at least 8 years old, then that child performs well the 8-years intelligence test” | Perspective effect does not require deontic context. Execution according to the activation of counterexamples. |
| Girotto, Kemmelmeier, Sperber & van der Henst (2001)27 | “If a person travels to any East African country, then that person must be immunized against cholera” | The context expressed in the text modulates the relevance to make inferences. |
| Thompson, Plowright, Atance & Caza (2015)28 | "If it is the first day of the month, then there must be pancakes for lunch”.
“If the child takes a cookie then the child must have earned a gold star sticker” | Interaction type of problem (“cheater or non-cheater”) and parental connection with the child (existent or non-existent). |
| Lampinen, Dasgupta, Chan, Sheahan, Creswell, Kumaran, McClelland & Hill (2024)29 | Three types of content: realistic: “If the clients are going skydiving, then they must have a parachute”; arbitrary: “If the cards have plural word, then they must have a positive emotion”; nonsense: “If the cards have more bem, then they must have less stope”. | Significant content advantages for the realistic tasks compared to arbitrary ones.
Spending longer on logical tasks can improve performance.
Better reasoning about consistent situations with subjects´ world. |
Table 1: Review of key empirical investigations on Wason´s selection task from the beginning until now, in chronological order. Please click here to download this Table.
The deontic versions express obligation or permission, include explicitly or implicitly deontic modal terms such as "should" or "must" and subjects have to decide whether or not the rule has been obeyed or disobeyed. On the contrary, indicative versions state factual relationships that may be true or false30,31,32,33,34. Following Evans and Over31, indicative and deontic tasks could be considered two distinct forms of the problem, depending on what kind of conditions and instructions are included. Indicative conditionals state factual relationships that may be true or false, whereas deontic conditionals express normative rules that may be obeyed or disobeyed. In terms of Manktelow & Over32, theoretical reasoning about states of affairs is different from practical reasoning about actions and social or moral rules.
From distinct theoretical perspectives it has been defended that deontic versions have different correct answers and are easier than indicative task, for multiple reasons: (1) because people reason with knowledge structures based on permissions and obligations; (2) because deontic rules trigger the Darwinian algorithms that detect potential cheaters; (3) because people analyze the usefulness of the rule, depending on the perspective from which they reason; (4) because deontic conditionals evoke pragmatic implicatures licensed by world knowledge, etc.
If, as proposed, there are two distinct forms of Wason's selection task: do conditionals in deontic versions have the same logical form as in the indicative abstract task? Are the correct answers different in indicative and deontic problems? The answer to these questions is fundamentally important for understanding the process of inference.
The overall goal of this protocol is to analyze how people test hypotheses and make inferences from if-then conditional statements, using Wason´s selection task. Specifically, an ANOVA 3 x 2 x 2 was performed. The gist of the protocol implies: (1) manipulate within subjects the type of content: all participants will receive three Wason´s selection task, with different thematic relationship between the antecedent and the consequent of the conditional rule: neutral, permission and obligation; (2) manipulate between subjects the framing of the task (deontic versus indicative) and (3) manipulate, also between subjects, the inclusion or non-inclusion of the task in a scenario (presence versus absence).
So, all subjects solved three thematic selection tasks in each of the four experimental conditions: scenario-deontic framing, scenario-indicative framing, no-scenario-deontic framing, and no-scenario-indicative framing.