Thinking and deciding beyond the brain

Manktelow and Over’s (1991) elegant demonstration of how utilities associated with different perspectives predict and explain systematic patterns of card choices in deontic versions of Wason’s (1968) card selection task was a source of inspiration for many. At the time of its publication, one of us (FVT) started working on another of Wason’s tasks, the so-called 2-4-6 task, exploring why so few participants performed well at the task and how the context of reasoning could be modified to encourage more creativity, diligence and better inductive reasoning. Our work soon led us to explore the role of utilities in this hypothesis-testing task, and then how utilities also play an important role in people’s ability to gauge the diagnostic value of new information in so-called pseudodiagnostic reasoning tasks.