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Author | Topic: Please take a run through my online experiment! (as in NOW!) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Ben! Member (Idle past 1429 days) Posts: 1161 From: Hayward, CA Joined: |
Abe: I ended the experiment a bit early; thanks to all who participated. I'll do my best to inform everyone more about the experiment later. Thanks again!
Hi all, As some of you may know, I'm taking some graduate classes this semester. I'd like to get into a Ph. D program... For one of my classes, we have to write an experimental paper (due: TOMORROW). I created an online experiment and thought I'd ask y'all to run through it. If you would please please do it, that would be awesome!! Here are the rules:
I would really appreciate anybody's participation. All you have to do to get started is to click on the link below. Remember the paper is due tomorrow night... so if you're gonna do this, please do it now!! No webpage found at provided URL: http://cc.domaindlx.com/bencip19/expt/ichiban.asp Thanks a million!Ben This message has been edited by Ben, Sunday, 2005/10/09 05:16 AM This message has been edited by Ben, Tuesday, 2005/10/11 05:38 PM
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Ben! Member (Idle past 1429 days) Posts: 1161 From: Hayward, CA Joined: |
Thanks Ned
Since you basically tagged your result via the time-stamp of your post (assuming you posted just after finishing), I can probably whip up an individual result for ya when I do data analysis tomorrow. I also plan on providing details about everything after the experiment is done. But for now... I demand silence! (slams iron fist down) Ben
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Ben! Member (Idle past 1429 days) Posts: 1161 From: Hayward, CA Joined: |
Please hit this while you can! I've got all the data analysis tables all set; some histograms are just a couple of clicks away. Thanks to the many who have participated already, and thanks to Jar for helping keep this topic current!
Ben
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Ben! Member (Idle past 1429 days) Posts: 1161 From: Hayward, CA Joined: |
Ringo316,
Thanks for the comment and the participation in the experiment. I appreciate your time. Unfortunately, you don't know my experimental conditions, manipulations, or what I'm trying to show. That's why I asked people not to post information about the experiment; if someone reads information about the experiment and then takes it, depending on what's been said and what the experimental conditions are, you can actually affect the outcome of the experiment. Next time I'd appreciate if you can send me a comment in email, or if you can simply wait until the experiment is done before posting a public comment about the contents of the experiment. Since I can't know if people are reading your comment before taking the experiment, I'm actually going to have to end it earlier than I wanted and ignore results I received last night after your post was made. Thanks for participating (really). Next time I'd appreciate it if you could be more careful. I explictly asked people not to do this in the opening post because it's really important. Ben This message has been edited by Ben, Sunday, 2005/10/09 05:25 AM
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Ben! Member (Idle past 1429 days) Posts: 1161 From: Hayward, CA Joined: |
Intentional or not, the error made it impossible for me to answer the question. Unfortunately, my innate nit-pickery overrode my memory of the instructions. Ah, a comment lament Thanks for pointing it out. I was assuming some context that some people seemed to pick up on (judging from the results), but that absolutely should have been made explicit. This may have made my result less strong than I wanted it to be... but maybe not. We'll never know Regardless, the result from this part of the experiment was highly significant
My apologies again to Ben for my screw-up. It's OK. I really appreciate your (and everybody else's) willingness to take a run through it. I'll try and explain the experiment in my next post. Feel free to nitpick away on anything you read there; having critical analysis will help me improve. Thanks!Ben
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Ben! Member (Idle past 1429 days) Posts: 1161 From: Hayward, CA Joined: |
This experiment was run to investigate "human reason" via the "Wason Card Selection Task." There were 6 versions of this task in my experiment. The task itself is, given a conditional experession, choose the cards that MUST be turned over to show the conditional to be true or false.
The experimental design is always the same. A conditional is given: IF [p] THEN [q] and 4 cards (always logically equivalent): [p] [~p][q] [~q] However, it has been noted many, many times, that performance on the task varies as you negate each components of the conditional. Thus, all negation cases must be tested: IF p then qIF p then ~q IF ~p then q IF ~p then ~q For my experiment, I was interested in two things:
One of the premises is that negation is "cognitively complex." This means that it more than a single "concept". "Not X" is not unitary in the same way that "X" or "Y" is. So for example, "not the letter A" is not reducible to a concept that any of us have. However, in some cases, "Not X" DOES correspond to some unitary "concept." For example, in the context of numbers, "not even" means "odd". In the context of brightness, very often "not bright" means "dark." (note: even though LOGICALLY speaking this isn't the case, cognitively it is often the case). In these cases where a reduction is POSSIBLE, I wanted to see if the reduction could be done. It's almost "obvious" from "symmetry" that it would be done--after all, there's no reason I would have chosen to negate "even" or "odd" in the first place. "Not odd" is "even" and "not even" is "odd", but each of the concepts stands on it's own, and if I tested you on either one without negation, I should get exactly the same result. Anyway, this was a step towards showing that negation is "cognitively complex". Once negation is considered to be cognitively "complex", then I can proceed with the argument in my paper (which I won't bother with here. Ugly and boring. Questions / comments are encouraged. And if anybody wants "answers", wants to point out ambiguities, or wants to talk about their reasoning process in trying to solve the problem... feel free. I'll do my best to respond... I'm still swamped. This paper was due on Friday ; even though I finished (finally), I'm still way behind......... Thanks again all!Ben
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Ben! Member (Idle past 1429 days) Posts: 1161 From: Hayward, CA Joined: |
Yup. Test's over. Sorry, I had edited the OP but didn't post that clearly.
Discuss away! Thanks!Ben
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Ben! Member (Idle past 1429 days) Posts: 1161 From: Hayward, CA Joined: |
Here's an easy graph to see how people did on each question:
In this view, each question (along the bottom) had the answer "Logical P" and "Logical ~Q". "Logical P" has a complex relationship to "P"; same with "Logical ~Q" and "Q"; this view "normalizes" for those factors. So just look at the "Logical P" and "Logical ~Q" bars. Those are the #s for right answers. The other bars are rates for wrong answers. Notice that performance varied by question. This is totally typical. Actually EvC-ers were
I can give more details as to what the "actual" answers to specific questions were, listing of questions, etc... if requested. I'm putting this up at nwr's request for now. Thanks!Ben This message has been edited by Ben, Monday, 2005/10/10 12:54 PM This message has been edited by Ben, Monday, 2005/10/10 12:57 PM
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Ben! Member (Idle past 1429 days) Posts: 1161 From: Hayward, CA Joined: |
I figured that since the definition purported to be inclusive that only one choice would determine whether it was true OR false. The instructions are kind of classic, so I won't take much flak for the wording but... each card is independent. The rule may hold for one card, but not for another. So ANY card that might show you whether the rule is true or false should be selected.
Could choose either what was said to be on the front or on the back and it would work as well. That's right.
I ended up with one choice for all questions, all determined by what was identified in the statement. Basically that's called "modus ponens". If p then q.... check the p card; if there's ~q on the other side, you're screwed (rule's wrong). Otherwise you're OK. The other one you need to do is "modus tollens" If p then q... check the ~q card. If on the other side is p, you're screwed (rule's wrong). Otherwise, you're OK. The other cards... none of them can show the rule is wrong. They can only be consistent. The key to this task is falsification. Most people try to prove the rule is "true" though (I think). Ben This message has been edited by Ben, Monday, 2005/10/10 01:18 PM
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Ben! Member (Idle past 1429 days) Posts: 1161 From: Hayward, CA Joined: |
1. Rule: If there is a B on one side of the card, then there will be a 3 on the other side.
Cards: B, 3, U, 6 Answers: B, 6 2. Rule: If there is a W on one side of the card, then there will not be a 3 on the other side.Cards: 2, W, 3, I Answers: W, 3 3. If there is not a consonant on one side of the card, then there will be an even number on the other side.Cards: 7, 4, A, C Answers: A, 7 4. If there is not a consonant on one side of the card, then there will not be an even number on the other side.Cards: P, 2, E, 5 Answers: E, 2 5. If there is a A on one side of the card, then there will be a 2 on the other side.Cards: A, N, 2, 7 Answer: A, 7 6. If there is a U on one side of the card, then there will not be a 6 on the other side.Cards: 6, U, 9, C Answer: U, 6
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Ben! Member (Idle past 1429 days) Posts: 1161 From: Hayward, CA Joined: |
But if the rule can be true for one card and false for the other, the whole thing hits me as too irrational to bother about. But I suppose I'm not getting something here. It's an experimental task. It's not so interesting. Calling it "irrational" is fairly amusing though. I can understand why you'd say that, and in the sense that you mean it, I agree. It's funny because the task is a test of logic; it's in another sense completely rational. But to answer... the point is to check if the rule holds for ALL cards. So yes, you have to consider all of them. The rule might hold for one and fail for another.
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Ben! Member (Idle past 1429 days) Posts: 1161 From: Hayward, CA Joined: |
"If B is on one side then 3 is on the other"
You have to check 6 because if there's a B on the other side, you're screwed. I think you're right--maybe I missed something from the original instructions. Looks like you have to assume that there's a letter on one side and a number on the other. I don't remember seeing that in the written instructions at all. But that goes back to ringo316's objection; there was supposed to be a context there (numbers on one side, letters on another), but it just wasn't there. That's a problem! But that's the way the cookie crumbles! Ben
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Ben! Member (Idle past 1429 days) Posts: 1161 From: Hayward, CA Joined: |
Faith,
If I give you four apples, and I say "none of the apples have worms in them." If you eat three of the apples and they're nice & tasty, and for the 4th one you bite into a worm, ... It's a similar situation. You have to check all cards that could possibly show your rule to be wrong. Like in the above example... if I gave you an apple, an orange, a box that said "fruit with a worm in it" and a box that said "fruit with no worm in it", in order to know if none of the apples have worms in them, you better check the apple and the box that's labeled "fruit with a worm in it." If that apple has a worm in it, then the rule is wrong. If the fruit with a worm in it is an apple... then the rule's wrong. Everything else, you don't have to bother checking. There's no way it can make your rule wrong. The others would be consistent with your rule no matter what (either they would be an apple without a worm, or they wouldn't be an apple and so wouldn't matter). You don't need to check if you know it's either going to be true or not be relevant at all. AbE: Faith, check the last paragraph to read why you don't have to check all the cards. To reiterate, some cards will be consistent with the rule no matter what; either it will have a B and a 3, OR it won't have a B... and so doesn't apply at all. For those cards, you don't have to bother checking. This message has been edited by Ben, Monday, 2005/10/10 01:48 PM
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Ben! Member (Idle past 1429 days) Posts: 1161 From: Hayward, CA Joined: |
OK, take the 3 card. There's 2 possibilities:
Is the first one consistent with your rule?
Is the second one consistent with your rule?
So both possibilities are consistent with the rule. Since there's no other possibility of what might be on the other side of the "3" card, then you don't have to check it. No matter what's there, it's not going to "break" the rule. Ben
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Ben! Member (Idle past 1429 days) Posts: 1161 From: Hayward, CA Joined: |
roxrkool,
It would be necessary for a biconditional (q if and only if p), but for the simple conditional (if p then q), the condition ~p is left unspecified. So, "if i run then i stink", what about if I don't run? Nothing's said. But "I stink if and only if I run", then if you run you stink, and if you don't run you don't stink. I think one of the major factors in the task has to do with this whole simple conditional / biconditional condition. I think (for a few psychological reasons) that we basically treat conditionals (especially abstract ones like the ones in this test) as biconditionals.
I guess I did it wrong. That's a WHOLE other debate The problems I gave can each be mapped to deductive logic problems... but the necessity or validity of doing so is really highly questionable. This is a test as much about how people interpret sentences as it is a test of deductive logic, maybe even moreso. I'm much more interested in understanding how people understand the questions than anything else. And thanks for running the experiment! Ben
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