On the Strategies that Blacks Employ in Deductive Reasoning

Abstract

Over the past two decades, Wason's Four-Card Selection Task has attracted such a large amount of research and has generated such varied, interesting, and controversial results that it has come to be regarded as a standard paradigm for looking at how people reason deductively. Nevertheless, this article, which replicates Griggs and Cox's (1983) second experiment with a sample of 192 undergraduate college students, reports the first systematic study of the strategies that Black Americans use in the selection task. The results largely parallel those reported by Griggs and Cox as well as those that have been reported by other researchers. Still, the present results do differ in a number of ways from prior findings. We report an atypically high rate of accuracy for the standard version of the selection task. Also, the effect of problem content on processing strategy is curiously small, and its structure is unprecedented. On balance, the results of this study challenge monolithic notions of cognitive development that universally ascribe deficits in reasoning ability to Blacks. Some Blacks, notably those researched here, appear to acquire conceptual rules for logical reasoning that are as powerful and as fallible as any developed by people in Western, literate societies. Future research should explore the etiology of individual differences in reasoning ability and proclivities among Blacks.