Costs and benefits in Wason's selection task: The Social Conditional Model 1The author wants to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments about an earlier draft of this paper.

Abstract

This paper proposes a synthesis of two contrasting theories formulated to explain the content effect in Wason's selection task (1966) , namely the Pragmatic Reasoning Schema Theory ( Cheng & Holyoak, 1985 , 1989 ) and the Social Contract Theory ( Cosmides, 1989 ; Gigerenzer & Hug, 1992 ). Although the authors have attempted to refute their competitors' theory, we can postulate that pragmatic schemas and utilities (costs and benefits) are in fact additional factors that influence performance in the thematic selection task. Using tasks from both models, the four studies presented here indicate that utilities influence responses within the structure of a pragmatic schema. Studies 1-3 suggest that the more costly the consequences of cheating, and the more probable cheating is, the better the cheater-detection. Study 4 indicates an effect of the actual benefit in a social situation. A more complex model distinguishing different kinds of utilities is proposed to account for these results: the Social Conditional Model (SCM).