Abstract
When people answer the question “How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?”, they usually respond with “two,” although Moses does not appear in the biblical story of the Ark. We investigated this “Moses illusion” in a multiple-choice format and tested the influence of monetary incentives on the illusion’s strength. Thereby, we addressed the role of a cooperative communication context for the illusion’s emergence, as well as the role of participants’ motivation. In four experiments (total N = 914), we found that the Moses illusion persists in a multiple-choice format. As the multiple-choice format realizes a cooperative context in which the correct answer is always available, we exclude a cooperative context explanation for the illusion. Monetary incentives reduced the strength of the illusion. However, the reduction was numerically and statistically small. We thereby show that the illusion is not due to violations of cooperative communications, and not due to a lack of motivation. The multiple-choice approach will facilitate further research on the Moses illusion and the data provide additional evidence for the Moses illusion’s empirical robustness and constrain its theoretical explanations.
Highlights
When people answer the question “How many animals of each kind did multiple-choice format across a series of distorted (Moses) take on the Ark?”, they usually respond with “two,” Moses does not appear in the biblical story of the Ark
Materials We used 40 questions in two versions each: a distorted version (i.e., “How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the ark?”) and an undistorted version (i.e., “How many animals of each kind did Noah take on the ark?”)
To provide an inferential statistical test, we coded Moses responses as 1 and all other response types as 0 before adding up all values to compute the total number of Moses responses for each participant
Summary
When people answer the question “How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?”, they usually respond with “two,” Moses does not appear in the biblical story of the Ark. As the multiple-choice format realizes a cooperative context in which the correct answer is always available, we exclude a cooperative context explanation for the illusion. The multiple-choice approach will facilitate further research on the Moses illusion and the data provide additional evidence for the Moses illusion’s empirical robustness and constrain its theoretical explanations. As. Grice (1975) delineated, people expect communication to be cooperative; that is, respondents expect that they should be able to answer a question. If the illusion persists in a multiple-choice format, it is unlikely to be due to norms of cooperative communication. Participants might not show the illusion if responses have real monetary consequences Rather, they might retrieve the fact that Noah, not Moses, is the Biblical character who built the Ark. In the remainder, we provide a short overview of research on the Moses illusion.
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