I once administered the 2-4-6 task to a friend. He made many guesses, and explained why he had made some of them when we were done. One particularly nice hypothesis he had tested was that the sum of the numbers had to be less than a fixed value. He didn’t solve the problem and, in fact, despite his search, he never found an example which the rule rejected before he gave up. My friend was looking for disconfirming evidence, he was just really bad at it. So bad he never through to try negative numbers, or numbers in non increasing order, or listing a smiley face instead of an integer to see whether the rule was defined outside the domain I had specified.
Of course I don’t deny the existence of positive bias based on one game with one person, but because of that experiment I’m curious: did you provide the group with a chance to share how well their performance was explained by positive bias or did you just...look for confirming evidence?
Did I just look for confirming evidence? Well, I suppose the answer is neither yes nor no. I didn’t really consider the performance of this group to be evidence at all. I consider the original result to be evidence and I ran it with the group purely as a way of creating engagement with that evidence rather than with the intention that their results would count as further evidence.
In terms of the general point though—that your experience demonstrates that some people who fail the task do test negative sequences—it certainly seems plausible that some of the people who get it wrong would fall into this category.
In Wason’s original version of the task, when someone guessed the wrong answer, they were able to continue to make guesses until they got it right. In this case, 22 out of 29 participants made an incorrect guess before they made a correct guess. It seems like if they were testing negative cases, this shouldn’t have been likely to occur (as if they tested a few negative cases, this probably would have revealed that they were wrong).
I once administered the 2-4-6 task to a friend. He made many guesses, and explained why he had made some of them when we were done. One particularly nice hypothesis he had tested was that the sum of the numbers had to be less than a fixed value. He didn’t solve the problem and, in fact, despite his search, he never found an example which the rule rejected before he gave up. My friend was looking for disconfirming evidence, he was just really bad at it. So bad he never through to try negative numbers, or numbers in non increasing order, or listing a smiley face instead of an integer to see whether the rule was defined outside the domain I had specified.
Of course I don’t deny the existence of positive bias based on one game with one person, but because of that experiment I’m curious: did you provide the group with a chance to share how well their performance was explained by positive bias or did you just...look for confirming evidence?
Perhaps he thought it was about sets of 3 numbers, not lists of 3 numbers, and always stated his sets in the obvious order? :P
Did I just look for confirming evidence? Well, I suppose the answer is neither yes nor no. I didn’t really consider the performance of this group to be evidence at all. I consider the original result to be evidence and I ran it with the group purely as a way of creating engagement with that evidence rather than with the intention that their results would count as further evidence.
In terms of the general point though—that your experience demonstrates that some people who fail the task do test negative sequences—it certainly seems plausible that some of the people who get it wrong would fall into this category.
In Wason’s original version of the task, when someone guessed the wrong answer, they were able to continue to make guesses until they got it right. In this case, 22 out of 29 participants made an incorrect guess before they made a correct guess. It seems like if they were testing negative cases, this shouldn’t have been likely to occur (as if they tested a few negative cases, this probably would have revealed that they were wrong).
Right, I was thinking more in the sense of you trying to give them evidence of the bias through the task. Sorry, that did come out wrong.