The Simple Logic Puzzle That Shows How Illogical People Are

The question is, which cards do you turn over to test the truth of the statement? Try to select the fewest cards that will do it. The Wason Selection Task was developed by English psychologist Peter Wason to study how people think. They often don’t think rationally.

(YouTube link)

I found the most difficult part was finding my answer among the multiple choices, because there are a lot of them. More than 90% of Wason’s original subjects selected the wrong answer. Maybe we are doing better in the 21st century, because when I snagged this video, 20,626 people had viewed the puzzle video, and 5393 had viewed the correct answer. However, that number may have been skewed by people checking out all the answer videos. I didn’t bother checking the incorrect answers. You can read about Wason’s research into the human tendency to select irrational paths at Nautilus. -via Digg

Update: Oh, okay, I clicked a wrong answer, and the video it went to gives you the option of seeing the correct answer video. That explains why the correct answer had much more than 10% of the views of the original.


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I can hardly believe I got it right! Maybe old age isn't affecting my mind as much as I thought. I agree, I've always been pretty good at intuitively finding the right answer on various tests and can't explain it. I found the little bit of their explanation that I listened to, to be confusing.
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I was sorely tempted to choose the wrong card. I had to stop and think very hard before I could come up with the right answer. Even knowing, the wrong choice seems to appeal more. I don't know why.
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I just used logic. Then I had to stop myself from overthinking it. In the back of my mind, I considered it might be a trick question, but since they said it isn't, I tried not to second-guess myself. It was a relief to find I was right.
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I chose the correct answer by sheer dumb luck. Well, not exactly. I have this intuitive feeling of what the correct answer would've been, I just can't explain why I chose it. Weird.
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