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Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
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Motivated Reasoning and Performance on the was on Selection Task

Erica Dawson

Cornell University, ecd6{at}cornell.edu

Thomas Gilovich

Cornell University

Dennis T. Regan

Cornell University

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.

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 28, No. 10, 1379-1387 (2002)
DOI: 10.1177/014616702236869
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