I was reading Buss’ Evolutionary Psychology, and came across a passage on ethical reasoning, status, and the cognitive bias associated with the Wason Selection Task. The quote:
Cummins (1998) marshals several forms of evidence to support the dominance theory. The first pertains to the early emergence in a child’s life of reasoning about rights and obligations, called deontic reasoning. Deontic reasoning is reasoning about what a person is permitted, obligated, or forbidden to do (e.g., Am I old enough to be allowed to drink alcoholic beverages?). This form of reasoning contrasts with indicative reasoning, which is reasoning about what is true or false (e.g., Is there really a tiger hiding behind that tree?). A number of studies find that when humans reason about deontic rules, they spontaneously adopt a strategy of seeking rule violators. For example, when evaluating the deontic rule “all those who drink alcohol must be twenty-one years old or older,” people spontaneously look for others with alcoholic drinks in their hands who might be underage. In marked contrast, when people evaluate indicative rules, they spontaneously look for confirming instances of the rule. For example, when evaluating the indicative rule “all polar bears have white fur,” people spontaneously look for instances of white-furred polar bears rather than instances of bears that might not have white fur. In short, people adopt two different reasoning strategies, depending on whether they are evaluating a deontic or an indicative rule. For deontic rules, people seek out rule violations; for indicative rules, people seek out instances that conform to the rule. These distinct forms of reasoning have been documented in children as young as three years old, suggesting that they emerge reliably early in life (Cummins, 1998). Perhaps no coincidentally, at age three, children organize themselves into transitive dominance hierarchies (that is, hierarchies in which if A is dominant to B and B is dominant to C, then A is dominant to C). Moreover young children also can reason about transitive dominance hierarchies earlier in life than they can reason transitively about other stimuli (Cummins, 1998).
That is from Chapter 12 Status, Prestige, and Social Dominance, page 366 of the Third Edition. The paper that Buss is quoting is Cummins’ Social Norms and other minds: The evolutionary roots of higher cognition. The PDF of the paper is here, and the discussion of deontic reasoning starts at the bottom of page 39.
edit: I am posting it here, because I had seen discussion of the Wason task from a confirmation bias viewpoint, but had not seen the behavioral ethics viewpoint fully explained before.
I was reading Buss’ Evolutionary Psychology, and came across a passage on ethical reasoning, status, and the cognitive bias associated with the Wason Selection Task. The quote:
That is from Chapter 12 Status, Prestige, and Social Dominance, page 366 of the Third Edition. The paper that Buss is quoting is Cummins’ Social Norms and other minds: The evolutionary roots of higher cognition. The PDF of the paper is here, and the discussion of deontic reasoning starts at the bottom of page 39.
edit: I am posting it here, because I had seen discussion of the Wason task from a confirmation bias viewpoint, but had not seen the behavioral ethics viewpoint fully explained before.