Saturday, May 23, 2015

"The Simple Logical Puzzle That Shows How Illogical People Are"

"Wason tells you that if a card shows an even number on one face, then its opposite face is blue. Which cards must you turn over in order to test the truth of his proposition, without turning over any unnecessary cards? Click on your answer in the interactive video below:"


"If you got it wrong, keep your spirits up: More than 90 percent of Wason’s subjects erred, too, and in quite a systematic way; the mistakes they made followed a pattern. “I feel very unhappy about my original choice,” a subject once told Wason, “but yes, I would still choose the same ones if I had to do the task again.” In that 1968 paper, titled “Reasoning about a Rule,” he wrote that these were “disquieting” results. The reigning assumption was that humans naturally reasoned analytically, but here was Wason’s subject admitting that, if given the choice, he’d be irrational again. It made Wason wonder: Is it the logical structure of the rules that make the puzzle difficult, or are people tripped up merely by the words with which the puzzle is expressed?

3 comments:

rcocean said...

I hate this kind of puzzles. Usually, people fail them not because they are "illogical" but because the rules aren't clear or the words in the ground rules are ambiguous.

rcocean said...

For example, I'm looking at the image and I have no idea what its supposed to mean. I see Several columns and 5 and 8 and blank. So what does that mean? How does relate to the question of how many cards do I need to turn over to prove that an Even card has a blue back? And why 14?

Sorry I just don't get it. There are 52 cards, 36 have numbers - 16 are face cards. 20 are even numbers, 16 are odd. So where does 14 come in?

Methadras said...

i took it literally and I don't know I know I am right. If a card is even, then it's other side is blue. so the only card here is 8, then I don't even need to turn it around to know that the other side is blue. It's already stated, so everything else is irrelevant. Am I wrong?