It seems much of our cognitive architecture was developed in the context of social situations. Indeed, the standard experiments on checking modus ponens and modus tollens understanding show sharp increases in ability when they are presented as social rules (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task checking whether someone is violating the “minor drinking alcohol” rules, rather than cards gives much higher performance). Testing whether you understand a social rule by deliberately violating your current understanding can be a very, very expensive test. It seems plausible that this cost has led to the human default ways for testing implicit rules to avoid seeking out these negatives, even when the cost would be low.
We’re good at reasoning with social situations, and bad with more abstract situations. As such, we can’t be doing them the same way. Something that helps in social situations is unlikely to cause a bias in more abstract situations.
In other words, our current architecture was developed in the context of social situations, and the fact that we do significantly better in those situations shows that it’s the only time we use it. Otherwise, we use different, lousy architecture that won’t exhibit the same biases.
It seems much of our cognitive architecture was developed in the context of social situations. Indeed, the standard experiments on checking modus ponens and modus tollens understanding show sharp increases in ability when they are presented as social rules (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task checking whether someone is violating the “minor drinking alcohol” rules, rather than cards gives much higher performance). Testing whether you understand a social rule by deliberately violating your current understanding can be a very, very expensive test. It seems plausible that this cost has led to the human default ways for testing implicit rules to avoid seeking out these negatives, even when the cost would be low.
We’re good at reasoning with social situations, and bad with more abstract situations. As such, we can’t be doing them the same way. Something that helps in social situations is unlikely to cause a bias in more abstract situations.
In other words, our current architecture was developed in the context of social situations, and the fact that we do significantly better in those situations shows that it’s the only time we use it. Otherwise, we use different, lousy architecture that won’t exhibit the same biases.