One such study is the famous Wason selection task, and there, evolutionary psychology gives a fundamentally very different sort of answer than what you’ve given: that we have evolved, innate cognitive modules that solve certain types of problems… but are not used at all when the same abstract form of problem is put in a different context:
Cosmides and Tooby argued that experimenters have ruled out alternative explanations, such as that people learn the rules of social exchange through practice and find it easier to apply these familiar rules than less-familiar rules. [...] They argued that such a distinction [between performance on the problem in a social context and the same problem otherwise], if empirically borne out, would support the contention of evolutionary psychologists that human reasoning is governed by context-sensitive mechanisms that have evolved, through natural selection, to solve specific problems of social interaction, rather than context-free, general-purpose mechanisms.
After reading the article, it seems like their conclusion is still debated. I’m also not convicted, although I have updated that the general-purpose mechanism hypothesis is less likely correct. There needs to be an experiment with the context being non-social but frequently occurs in people’s lives. For instance, “if you arrived to the airport less than 30 minutes before your departure, you are not able to check in.” Then compare results with those from people who have never been on a plane before.
Edit: I realized my example can also be explained by the “cheater detector module”. In fact, any question with the conext being a human imposed rule can be explained the same way. A better question would be “if your car runs out of fuel, your car cannot be driven.”
One such study is the famous Wason selection task, and there, evolutionary psychology gives a fundamentally very different sort of answer than what you’ve given: that we have evolved, innate cognitive modules that solve certain types of problems… but are not used at all when the same abstract form of problem is put in a different context:
The explanation on wikipedia is well worth a read.
After reading the article, it seems like their conclusion is still debated. I’m also not convicted, although I have updated that the general-purpose mechanism hypothesis is less likely correct. There needs to be an experiment with the context being non-social but frequently occurs in people’s lives. For instance, “if you arrived to the airport less than 30 minutes before your departure, you are not able to check in.” Then compare results with those from people who have never been on a plane before.
Edit: I realized my example can also be explained by the “cheater detector module”. In fact, any question with the conext being a human imposed rule can be explained the same way. A better question would be “if your car runs out of fuel, your car cannot be driven.”