Cheater-Detection Module: An Evolutionary Psychological Study On Conditional Reasoning

Reasoning is one fundamental cognitive capacity of human being, which is necessary for us to conduct scientific researches and solve the everyday problems. However, many researches show that people have some irrational reasoning biases which lead to their very low performance. Thus, the researches on conditional reasoning can not only help us understand the nature of human reasoning, but also provide some guidance for our problem-solving and decision making.According previous studies, we can presume that most researchers tend to consider human reasoning as a general and content-independent psychological mechanism. But it is puzzling that the subjects differently react on the conditional rules with various contents. Evolutionary psychology (EP), as a promising psychological paradigm, provides one interpretation for the content effect from another perspective. Evolutionary psychology argues that our cognitive capacities are shaped during the evolutionary history of human being, and each psychological mechanism is designed to solve some specific adaptive problems. As for social exchange, human being has evolved a specialized reasoning mechanism - cheater-detecting module - which is used to find the potential cheaters. This module helps us complete the reasoning tasks involving cheating contexts successfully.The Wason selection task is used and its content effect is primarily discussed in this study. We choose the mixed designs to test the three following theories: social contact theory (SCT), availability theory, pragmatic reasoning schema theory (PRST). The results show:(1)The subjects' performance on abstract selection task is very low, which corresponds with the results from previous studies. Although familiar reasoning rules elicit moderate P&-Q reaction, the familiarity of rules' content is NOT an critical factor impacting on the performance. Indeed, the unfamiliar standard social contracts elicit much higher P&-Q reaction than the familiar descriptive rules.(2)Most subjects react P&-Q on the unfamiliar standard social contract rules, and -Q&P on the unfamiliar switched social contract rules. However, the switched permission rules can't elicit the predicted high response -Q&P. These results support the social contract hypothesis which suggests human beings use the adaptive logic—not classic formal logic—to deal with the problems concerning the social exchange.(3)The performance between the cheating rules and the non-cheating permission rules don't show the significant difference, which don't correspond with the previous results.