Evaluating Negative Tests and Refutations in a Rule Discovery Task

Yaakov Kareev*, Naftali Halberstadt

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

15 Scopus citations

Abstract

Subjects participating in Wason's rule discovery task (1960) overwhelmingly try to confirm rather than refute their currently held hypothesis. Such a strategy is often inadequate and runs counter to the canons of scientific methodology. The present study was designed to investigate subjects’ differential evaluation of test strategies and outcome. One-hundred and sixty students participated in two experiments in which they had to judge someone else's potential test items in Wason's task. Experiment 1 demonstrated that exposure to various histories has a mediating effect on the strength of the confirmation bias. In Experiment 2, subjects knew the researcher's rule and thus whether each proposed test item would lead to confirmation or refutation of the hypothesis under consideration. The preferred items were those that alerted the subject to an incorrect hypothesis (refutation) and those that turned out to be positive instances of the rule sought after, with the combination of the two (a negative test leading to refutation) being most highly evaluated.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)715-727
Number of pages13
JournalQuarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A: Human Experimental Psychology
Volume46
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Nov 1993

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