Evolutionary Psychology and Human Reasoning: Testing the Domain-Specificity Hypothesis through Wason Selection Task.

The better performance in the selection task with deontic rules, compared to the descriptive version, has been interpreted by evolutionary psychologists as the evidence that human reasoning has been shaped to deal with either global or specific deontic norms. An alternative hypothesis is that the two types of rules have been embedded in two different forms of reasoning, about and from a rule, the former demanding more complex cognitive processes. In a between-subjects study with 640 participants we manipulated the content of the rule (deontic vs. social contract vs. precaution vs. descriptive) and the type of task (reasoning about, traditionally associated to indicative tasks, vs. reasoning from, traditionally associated to deontic tasks). Results showed that the better performance is independent of the content of the rule and is associated to the "reasoning from" task.