Alexander Staller Perspective Effects 1 Running Head: Non-deontic Perspective Effects Perspective Effects in Non-deontic Versions of the Wason Selection Task Perspective Effects in Non-deontic Versions of the Wason Selection Task an Example-based Account of Perspective Effects

Perspective Effects 2 Abstract Perspective effects in the Wason four-card selection task occur when people choose mutually exclusive sets of cards depending on the perspective they adopt when making their choice. Previous demonstrations of perspective effects have been limited to deontic contexts; i.e., problem contexts that involve social duty, like permissions and obligations. In three experiments, we demonstrate perspective effects in non-deontic contexts, including a context much like the original one employed by Wason (1966, 1968). We suggest that perspective effects arise whenever the task uses a rule that can be interpreted biconditionally and different perspectives elicit different counterexamples that match the predicted choice sets. This view is consistent with domain-general theories but not with domain-specific theories of deontic reasoning, e.g., pragmatic reasoning schemas and social contract theory, that cannot explain perspective effects in non-deontic contexts. Are the procedures that people use to reason domain-specific or domain-general? Much of the support for the view that reasoning is domain-specific comes from work on the Wason selection task (WST; Wason, 1966, 1968). A number of theories propose that people's reasoning in this task depends on whether the task uses deontic content or not; i.e., whether it asks people to reason about a social rule concerning duty or obligation or some other kind of rule. One type of evidence that appears to suggest that deontic reasoning is special involves perspective effects, demonstrations that choice in the WST varies with the perspective adopted during task performance. These demonstrations have been limited to deontic contexts account for these effects, theorists have posited that performing this task in a deontic context activates specialized domain-specific reasoning processes that elicit a different pattern of response than does reasoning in other contexts (e. The objective of this paper is to show that the " deontic " response pattern can be obtained in non-deontic contexts. Such a result would suggest that Wason task performance can be attributed to a domain-general procedure. We propose, in agreement with existing domain-general theories, that perspective effects in both deontic and non-deontic contexts depend on the elicitation of counterexamples. In the original abstract version of the WST, participants are presented with four cards. On one side of each card is a letter, and on the other side of the card is a number. Participants are then given a conditional rule of the form " If p then q, " for example " If there is …