Motivated Reasoning and Performance on the was on Selection Task

Abstract

People tend to approach agreeable propositions with a bias toward confirmation and disagreeable propositions with a bias toward disconfirmation. Because the appropriate strategy for solving the four-card Wason selection task is to seek disconfirmation, the authors predicted that people motivated to reject a task rule should be more likely to solve the task than those without such motivation. In two studies, participants who considered a Wason task rule that implied their own early death (Study 1) or the validity of a threatening stereotype (Study 2) vastly outperformed participants who considered nonthreatening or agreeable rules. Discussion focuses on how a skeptical mindset may help people avoid confirmation bias both in the context of the Wason task and in everyday reasoning.