Editing Wason selection task (section)

===Policing social rules===
{{Main|Evolution of human intelligence#Social exchange theory|Cheating (biology)}}
{{See also|Evolution of human intelligence#Sexual selection|Evolution of morality|Prisoner's dilemma|Social selection}}

As of 1983, experimenters had identified that success on the Wason selection task was highly context-dependent, but there was no theoretical explanation for which contexts elicited mostly correct responses and which ones elicited mostly incorrect responses.<ref name="cogadapt"/>
[[File:Wason selection task cards - drinking variant.svg|upright=1.35|thumb|Each card has an age on one side and a drink on the other. Which card(s) must be turned over to test the idea that if you are drinking alcohol, then you must be over 18?]]
[[Evolutionary psychology|Evolutionary psychologists]] [[Leda Cosmides]] and [[John Tooby]] (1992) identified that the selection task tends to produce the "correct" response when presented in a context of [[social relation]]s.<ref name="cogadapt"/> For example, if the rule used is "If you are drinking alcohol, then you must be over 18" or in other words "If you are not over 18, then you must not drink alcohol", and the cards have an age on one side and beverage on the other, e.g., "16", "drinking beer", "25", "drinking soda", most people have no difficulty in selecting the correct cards ("16” and "drinking beer").<ref name="cogadapt"/> In a series of experiments in different contexts, subjects demonstrated consistent superior performance when asked to police a social rule involving a benefit that was only legitimately available to someone who had qualified for that benefit.<ref name="cogadapt"/> Cosmides and Tooby argued that experimenters have ruled out alternative explanations, such as that people learn the rules of social exchange through practice and find it easier to apply these familiar rules than less-familiar rules.<ref name="cogadapt"/>

According to Cosmides and Tooby, this experimental evidence supports the hypothesis that a Wason task proves to be easier if the rule to be tested is one of social exchange (''in order to receive benefit X you need to fulfill condition Y'') and the subject is asked to police the rule, but is more difficult otherwise. They argued that such a distinction, if empirically borne out, would support the contention of evolutionary psychologists that human [[reason]]ing is governed by context-sensitive mechanisms that have evolved, through [[natural selection]], to solve specific problems of social interaction, rather than context-free, general-purpose mechanisms.<ref name="cogadapt">{{cite book | last1=Cosmides | first1=L. | author-link=Leda Cosmides |last2=Tooby|first2= J.  | editor1-last=Barkow |editor1-first=J.| editor2-last=Cosmides | editor2-first=L. | editor3-last=Tooby|editor3-first= J.  | chapter=Cognitive Adaptions for Social Exchange |title= The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture| year=1992 | location=New York | publisher=Oxford University Press |chapter-url=https://www.cep.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Cogadapt.pdf |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=rTzuAAAAMAAJ |pages=163–228 |isbn=978-0-19-506023-2}}</ref> In this case, the module is described as a specialized cheater-detection module.<ref name="cogadapt"/>

==== Evaluation of social relations hypothesis ====
Davies et al. (1995) have argued that Cosmides and Tooby's argument in favor of context-sensitive, domain-specific reasoning mechanisms as opposed to general-purpose reasoning mechanisms is theoretically incoherent and inferentially unjustified.<ref name="DFF">{{cite journal |last1= Davies |first1= Paul Sheldon |last2= Fetzer |first2= James H. |last3= Foster |first3= Thomas R. |year= 1995 |title= Logical reasoning and domain specificity |journal= [[Biology and Philosophy]] |volume= 10 |issue= 1 |pages= 1–37 |doi= 10.1007/BF00851985 |s2cid= 83429932 }}</ref> Von Sydow (2006) has argued that we have to distinguish deontic and descriptive conditionals, but that the logic of testing deontic conditionals is more systematic (see Beller, 2001) and depend on one's goals (see Sperber & Girotto, 2002).<ref name="vonSydow2006">{{cite thesis | last=von Sydow| first=M. | title= Towards a Flexible Bayesian and Deontic Logic of Testing Descriptive and Prescriptive Rules| year=2006| location=Göttingen | publisher=Göttingen University Press | doi=10.53846/goediss-161 | s2cid=246924881 |url=https://ediss.uni-goettingen.de/handle/11858/00-1735-0000-0006-AC29-9| type=doctoralThesis | doi-access=free }}</ref><ref name="Beller2001">{{cite book |last=Beller |first=S. |editor1-last=Moore |editor1-first=J. D. |editor2-last=Stenning |editor2-first= K. |chapter=A model theory of deontic reasoning about social norms |title=Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society |year=2001 |location=Mahwah, NJ |publisher=Lawrence Erlbaum |pages=63–68}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Sperber |first1=D. |last2=Girotto |first2=V. |year=2002 |title=Use or misuse of the selection task? |journal=Cognition |volume=85 |issue=3 |pages=277–290 |doi=10.1016/s0010-0277(02)00125-7 |pmid=12169412 |citeseerx=10.1.1.207.3101 |s2cid=2086414}}</ref> However, in response to [[Satoshi Kanazawa|Kanazawa]] (2010),<ref name="Kanazawa2010">{{cite journal |last1=Kanazawa |first1=Satoshi |author-link1=Satoshi Kanazawa |date=May–June 2010 |title=Evolutionary Psychology and Intelligence Research |journal=[[American Psychologist]] |volume=65 |issue=4 |pages=279–289 |doi=10.1037/a0019378 |pmid=20455621 |url=http://personal.lse.ac.uk/Kanazawa/pdfs/AP2010.pdf |access-date=February 16, 2018}}</ref> [[Scott Barry Kaufman|Kaufman]] et al. (2011) gave 112 subjects a 70-item computerized version of the contextualized Wason card-selection task proposed by Cosmides and Tooby (1992) and found instead that "performance on non-arbitrary, evolutionarily familiar problems is more strongly related to general intelligence than performance on arbitrary, evolutionarily novel problems",<ref name="KDRG">{{cite journal |last1=Kaufman |first1=Scott Barry |author-link1=Scott Barry Kaufman |last2=DeYoung |first2=Colin G. |author-link2=Colin G. DeYoung |last3=Reis |first3=Deidre L. |last4=Gray |first4=Jeremy R. |date=May–June 2010 |title=General intelligence predicts reasoning ability even for evolutionarily familiar content |journal=[[Intelligence (journal)|Intelligence]] |volume=39 |issue=5 |pages=311–322 |doi=10.1016/j.intell.2011.05.002 |url=https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Kaufman-DeYoung-Reis-Gray-2011.pdf |access-date=February 16, 2018}}</ref> and writing for ''[[Psychology Today]]'', Kaufman concluded instead that "It seems that general intelligence is very much compatible with evolutionary psychology."<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Kaufman |first1=Scott Barry |author-link1=Scott Barry Kaufman |date=July 2, 2011 |title=Is General Intelligence Compatible with Evolutionary Psychology? |journal=[[Psychology Today]] |publisher=Sussex Publishers |url=https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/beautiful-minds/201107/is-general-intelligence-compatible-evolutionary-psychology |access-date=February 16, 2018}}</ref>