engleski

Metacognitive judgments during solving of Wason selection task

The Wason selection task is a classic problem in the psychology of reasoning. The majority of Wason selection task solvers give the wrong answer. This eff ect is explained by a particular cognitive bias which is called confirmation bias. Experiments usually show that this bias is strongest when the content of the task is abstract, and that when concrete content is included in the task the effect of the bias becomes lesser. According to the dual process theory, people use two different systems of thinking: Type 1 which is swift, intuitive and based on heuristics, and Type 2 which is slow, analytical and based on mental skills. The activation of the confirmation bias represents the Type 1 system of thinking. It was expected that this kind of answer would be fast, biased and that at the same time participants would have high metacognitive judgments of confidence in validity of their answers. The aim of the research was to examine efficiency and metacognitive judgments of confidence in Wason tasks. The experiment had three situations, achieved by manipulating content concreteness (abstract, concrete and concrete that includes social contract). The participants’ task was, as in the classical Wason task, to choose which cards need to be checked in order to test the validity of the displayed conditional rule. Types of answers, as well as response times were recorded. After every answer participants had to judge their confidence in the validity of their answer. The obtained results showed strong confirmation bias which was also accompanied with high metacognitive assessments as expected. Most of the participants in most of the tasks demonstrated confirmation bias by choosing the same two cards and that answer was false. At the same time they were very confident in their own answers. Surprisingly, concrete content did not decrease the bias effect. Obtained results are in line with the understanding that Type 1 thinking processes rapidly suggest the answer which is, in this case, false. But fluency of generating that answer affects the participant’s metacognition and because of that she significantly overestimates her performance. Moreover, the judged confidence correlated with response times, which is in line with other research of metacognitive processes involved in reasoning tasks.

Wason selection task, metacognition, reasoning, judgements of confidence

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