A Psychological Study Of Conditional Reasoning Of The Cost-benefit Structure

Since “content effects” had been discovered of the Wason selection task (alsoknown as the four card task)，it aroused many researchers’ wide interest. But many ofthe results are not consistent, and sometimes conflicting. In order to explain thisphenomenon of “content effects", there has emerged many theoretical or model, butthese theories seems have some deficiencies always.Cosmides&Tooby analysis the "Content effects" of the four cards task from anevolutionary point of view, then put forward a new perspective and believe that thereason of many theories can not explain the “content effects” is the basis of thesetheoretical assumptions-the same cognitive process controlled different areas ofreasoning, is wrong.The social contract theory which based on the perspective of evolutionarypsychology believe that the human mind is the most complex natural phenomenonhumans have yet encountered, that the human mind is the product of the evolutionaryprocess, and that the human mind contains algorithms (specialized mechanisms)designed for reasoning about social exchange, and social exchange is anevolutionarily crucial domain.Our social contract algorithms operate on cost-benefit representations becausethis is the highest level of abstraction at which social exchange can be understood.In order to make people easier to participate in social exchange reasoning，Procedures that make us very good at detecting cheating were directly programmedinto our Darwinian algorithms for reasoning about social exchange.Social contract theory not only provides the most parsimonious explanation ofthe data, but the assumption that some innate algorithms are special-purpose andcontent-dependent is also more parsimonious from the standpoint of evolutionarytheory. The social contract theory is considered to be far more one of the effectiveexplain theory of “content effects".On an empirical level, social contract theory is theonly candidate theory to attempt to stalk the “elusive content effect” on the selectiontask. Although this theory has been supported by a series of experiments evidence, itsuffered a lot of criticism also, and there are still many problems to be solved: Such aswhether there are differences between the standard social contract rules and the switchsocial contract rules, Why do people choose altruism cards on the cost-benefit structure of social exchange reasoning, more importantly, The cost-benefit structuralconditions reasoning can only explain by the social contract theory, or it isdomain-specific evolution results and so on, There are little research on these issuesdomestic and abroad. So it is important to strengthen the research in this field forrevealing the cognitive rule of people’s reasoning and decision-making.This research mainly conducted five research seven experiments, wereinvestigated respectively:1) The influence of instructions on conditional reasoning ofthe cost-benefit structure;2)The differences between experts and novices onconditional reasoning of the cost-benefit structure;3)The difference and it’s reasonbetween the standard social contract and switched social contract rule;4) The selectionof altruistic cards on the conditional reasoning of the cost-benefit structure;5)Thestudy on development of conditional reasoning of the cost-benefit structure.The main findings of this study are as follows:1) The falsifiable instruction is helpful in improving the subjects’ performanceon conditional reasoning of the cost-benefit structure.2) There was no significant difference of the social contract scores between theexperts and novices on the conditional reasoning of cost-benefit structure.3) Compared with unfamiliar social contract，Participants word better on thefamiliar social contract.4) The subjects’ performance on the standard social contract rules is better thanthat of the switched social contract rule.5) Participants were more likely to choose the altruism card on the switchedsocial contract rules than that of the standard social contract rule.6) Chinese subjects chose altruistic card more than the American subjects, Thismay be the results of Chinese and foreign cultural differences, But there have nosignificant differences between the Han Nationality and Uigur nationality7) People’s reasoning ability on social contract has been on the upswing fromchildhood until late adulthood, and the adulthood is the period of the rapiddevelopment of reasoning ability throughout the life.8) As for the Standards social contract issues, Early adulthood is the highest peakof the development of people’s reasoning ability; But in terms of switched socialcontract issues, the highest peak is happened in the middle-adulthood; The bestreasoning scores of the social rules of contract problems occur in early adulthood; andit occurs in middle-adulthood of the personal rules of contract reasoning.The results of this series of experiments showed that social contract theory can partly explain the result of conditional reasoning on the cost-benefit structure. Such asthere have good results on conditional reasoning of the cost-benefit structure contentin generally. But it can not explain the performs of the standard social contract rulesare better than that of the switch social contract, it can not explain the influence offamiliarity on the conditional reasoning of cost-benefit and so on. On the contrary, thememory cue hypothesis and the dual structure model of item and knowledge canexplain it to some extent.It also show that although the social contract theory,which based on evolutionarypsychology advocated domain-specific reasoning process, there is no evidence tosupport the field universality thinking is a domain-specific adaptation.Therefore, thisstudy suggests that integrated the existing theoretical point of view, the conditionalreasoning of costs-benefit structure of such higher mental processing capacity can beexplained both by the domain-specific social contract theory and the otherdomain-general theory. So you can say it is a complex of the domain-general anddomain-specific.