Also worth noting: performance does tend to increase with physiological or mental arousal, but only up to a point. When levels of arousal become too high, performance decreases.
T&C report that mapping the Wason selection task to examples from everyday life doesn’t improve performance, only when changed to detecting cheating does it change performance.
I don’t think T&C established that the “cheat detection” hardwired module was the only thing that could have an effect on the test.
They compared performance on versions of the test presented as a social contract problem with logically identical versions using non-hardwired stuff like traveling to Boston, but I don’t think there was anything presented as mind-killer politics, sexual selection, status signaling, etc.
It was much easier to solve this one by mapping it to an existing social heuristic. Motivation didn’t seem to be a significant factor in this case.
Motivation and using the native architecture where appropriate are both important factors in performance.
Also worth noting: performance does tend to increase with physiological or mental arousal, but only up to a point. When levels of arousal become too high, performance decreases.
T&C report that mapping the Wason selection task to examples from everyday life doesn’t improve performance, only when changed to detecting cheating does it change performance.
I don’t think T&C established that the “cheat detection” hardwired module was the only thing that could have an effect on the test.
They compared performance on versions of the test presented as a social contract problem with logically identical versions using non-hardwired stuff like traveling to Boston, but I don’t think there was anything presented as mind-killer politics, sexual selection, status signaling, etc.
Maybe that wouldn’t be a bad idea?