Abstract

The idea that human rational thought was governed by content-independent logical rules/axioms was brought down by psychology experiments using the Wason Selection Task, which demonstrated that people performed better on some tasks than others, even though the tasks had the same logical structure. What determined their performance? Cosmides came up with the idea of a social contract, and demonstrated in 1989, that selection tasks pertaining to social contracts were easier for people to solve. Gigerenzer and Hug published their work in 1992, which strongly supported Cosmides' Social Contract theory, disentangled social contracts from cheating and also delved into perspective change. The goal of my project has been to replicate the striking results of Cosmides' work and that of Gigerenzer/Hug's(first part). The experiment was conducted on Institute students, and the results obtained have been mixed in nature. On a whole, social contract and cheating theories are supported by the results.

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Project Report
Presentation
Project Proposal
Paper: Gigerenzer, G./Hug, K. 1992. Domain-specific reasoning, social contracts, cheating, and perspective change. Cognition 43: 127-171
A Question to test the Social Contract Theory