3 What sorts of reasoning modules have been provided by evolution? Some experiments conducted among Tukano speakers in Brazilian Amazonia concerning reasoning about conditional propositions and about conditional probabilities David P. O’Brien, Anténio Roazzi, Renato Athias, and Maria do Carmo Brandao We investigate two claims made by Cosmides and her associates about content-specific reasoning processes (e.g., Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992; Brase, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1998; Cosmides, 1989; Cosmides & Tooby, 1992, 1994; Fiddick, Cosmides, & Tooby, 2000; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). The first is a bioevolutionary argument that the environmental pressures on our Pleistocene ancestors resulted in a content-specific reas- oning module for identifying violators of social contracts, but not in any content-general modules such as a mental logic for conditionals, of the sort we have proposed (e.g., O’Brien, 2004; O’Brien, Roazzi, Athias, Dias, Brandio, & Brooks, 2003; see Braine & O'Brien (1998) for the most complete presentation of mental-logic theory and evidence in its support). The second claim is that the same human bioevolutionary history has provided a module for representing and reasoning about frequencies of events, but not for the probabilities of single events. We reject the claim that human bioevolutionary history requires the sort of content-specific modules that are proposed by Cosmides and her associ- ates, We do not claim that content does not matter when people reason, but we disagree that adequate reasons have been provided — either theoretical or empirical — to think that content-general procedures are not among the basic reasoning processes. First, we describe the bioevolutionary proposals and the arguments and evidence presented for them. Then we describe data from three experiments conducted with Tukano speakers in the northwest Amazon basin of Brazil, as well as with university students in New York, that show that even in an illiterate indigenous population without formal education, none of the response tendencies that would be predicted from the proposals of Cosmides and her associates was found.Athias, Brandao 60 O'Brien, Roaz The social-contract hypothesis and Wason’s selection task We turn first to the proposal concerning a content-specific module that enables identification of violators of social contracts (e.g., Cosmides, 1989. Fiddick et al., 2000). This was that the mind contains a specialised reasoning module that was adaptive for the social world of our hunter/gatherer ancestors, whose societies would have needed to make judgments about who was violating contracts pertaining to the granting of benefits and the extracting of costs. A society based on a cost/benefit system of social exchanges would require that its members have the necessary cognitive equipment to detect cheaters, and therefore the mind must contain a bioevolutionarily derived module for identifying them. Social exchanges have a conditional form - if one takes the benefit, one must pay the cost - but according to the social-contract theorists these social pressures would not have led to the development of any general logical reasoning abilities that would apply for evaluating conditionals across broad sorts of content. No other environmental pressures would have led to any content-general logical reasoning procedures. From the perspective of social-contract theory, reasoning thus is based on some fairly narrow content-specific modules. The empirical support for the social-contract hypothesis has come from comparisons between two general versions of Wason’s selection task: one 1 contract and requires identification of that presents a conditional social that presents an indicative conditional potential cheaters, and another assertion and either requires identification of potential evidence that the assertion is false, or identification of potential violators. The general form of the task (Wason, 1968) presents a conditional, if'p then q, together with four cards showing p, not p, g, and not q, respectively. Participants are told that on one side of each card is a value for p (i.e., either p or not p) and 00 the other side a value for q (i.e. either or not q) and are asked to select those cards whose inspection could reveal that the conditional is false, of that it has been violated. Social-contract versions of the problem (¢.8» Cosmides, 1989; Fiddick et al., 2000) present a rule of the form if a person takes a benefit then that person must pay the cost together with four cards showing a person taking a benefit, a person not taking the benefit, a perso who has paid the cost, and a person who has not paid the cost. Participants were asked to identify the cards with the potential to identify cheaters, that is the p and not q cards. For example, for a rule that if someone in @ particular society eats a particular kind of meat, that person must have 4 tattoo, people would need to choose cards showing a person eating this kind of pene = a person without a tattoo. typic control problem asked participants (in i hu- sets) to imagine that they had readin aon & mune mais tbat cn bia ie pera ~ into Boston, then that person takes the subway. Astington) and Is showed a destination on one side (either Boston oF a means of transportation on the other side (subway of3. Reasoning by Tukano speakers 61 taxicab). Participants were asked to select the cards that could identify whether the conditional rule was being violated. The putatively correct answer was to select the cards showing Boston (p) and taxicab (not q). Cosmides reported that typically people chose the p and not q cards more often on social-contract problems than on such a control problem, con- cluding that if the human mind had evolved procedures for detecting logical violations of conditional rules, people ought to choose the p and not q instances on the control problems as well. The fact that such selections are rare, she argued, indicates that the mind has not evolved domain general logical procedures, but instead has evolved specialised procedures applic- able only to the social-contract situation. Thus, people give p and not q responses.to the social-contract problems because the content triggers the cheater-detection module, which cannot be triggered by a problem without a social contract. We find the argument problematic. First, note the idea that observation of people’s commuting habits would lead to a rule about relations between destinations and means of transportation. Although observations about the typical behaviours of commuters plausibly could lead to assertions about their habits, these hardly seem to qualify as rules that could be violated. This makes the control problem intuitively-odd in a way that the social- contract version is not. When one is asking people to seek counterexamples to a conditional assertion, it would be better to ask for potentially falsifying instances rather than potential rule violators; people typically do not think that assertions can be violated, although they do think of them as open to falsification (see O’Brien, Roazzi, Dias, Cantor, & Brooks, 2004). Further, although one can think of a rule as being universally applicable (¢.g., driving on a specific side of the highway is applicable to everyone), inductive generalisations about commuters’ tendencies based on observation hardly qualify as universal. Indeed, it is likely that the students who received such problems would have understood the quantification of the conditional assertion not as universal but as typical; that is, although one typically takes the subway to Boston, exceptions such as taxicabs, bicycles, and walking also occur without threatening the truth of the assertion. The control problems thus seem to provide a very different sort of quantification from the social-contract problems, which nullifies the notion that an instance of P and not q is either a violation or a falsifier (see also Stenning & van Lambalgen, Chapter 8, this volume). _ The most directly relevant data presented in support of the bioevolu- tionary claim about the reasoning of hunter/gatherers were presented by Sugiyama, Tooby, and Cosmides (2002). This came from fieldwork with a Temote indigenous group, the Shiwiar, in Ecuadorian Amaz6nia. The data included a comparison between a social-contract version and a descriptive Version of the selection task. The conditionals were embedded within story Contexts, with every problem referring to a conditional that was not pre- viously known to the Shiwiar. The descriptive problem presented, in the62. O'Brien, Roazzi, Athias, Brandéo iwi itional “if there is a green butterfly j Shiwiar language, the conditional e u yin the pic on the top part of the card, then there is a red flower in the picture oe Ure bottom part of the card.” The social contract presented the rule, “if you hich was described as an aphrodisiac), then you bn jongo nut (WI b h fave fatto on your chest (which was described as denoting married status).” Fourteen of the 21 Shiwiar participants selected the p and not cards on the social-contract problem, whereas only three of the 21 did so on the descriptive problem. This difference stemmed entirely from the q and not q cards, with moderately more selections of q (67 vs .48) and fewer of not q (.52 vs .86) for descriptive than for social-contract problems, Sugiyama et al. interpreted the differences in terms of the availability of g violator-checking module for the social-contract problem that they claimed is missing for the descriptive problem. Of course, one could choose instead to interpret the difference in terms of a differential interest in an aphro. disiac in the social-contract problem versus de-contextualised and unmoti- vated pictures of butterflies and flowers in the control problem. Bayesian-reasoning tasks and the frequentist hypothesis Cosmides and her associates (¢.g., Cosmides & Tooby, 1996; Brase, et al., 1998) have argued that bioevolutionary processes would have resulted in representational formats and reasoning processes for event frequencies, but not for the probabilities of single events. Together with an overlapping proposal by Gigerenzer and his associates (e.g., Gigerenzer & Hoffrage, 1995), this has become known as the frequentist hypothesis. The bioevolu- tionary argument claims that because one cannot observe the probability of a single event — the event either occurs or it does not — it follows that it is impossible for nature to build a sense organ for detecting single-event probabilities: “No organism can evolve cognitive mechanisms designed to reason about, or receive as input, information in a format that did not regularly exist” (Cosmides & Tooby, 1996, p. 15). Unlike probabilities, which were claimed to be completely separate from observation, Cosmides and Tooby assumed that frequencies are open directly to observation - as Cosmides and Tooby (1996) put it, frequencies are “available in the environment” (p. 15), and Brase et al. (1998, p. 3) wrote, “the ‘probability’ of a single event cannot be observed by an individual . . . an individual can, however, observe the frequency with which events occur.” On their argument, then, our hunter/gatherer ancestors could observe, for example, that 15 out of the past 20 hunting expeditions to some particular location were successful. As Cosmides and Tooby (1996, pp. 15-16) expressed it, “our hominid ancestors were immersed in a rich flow of observable fre- Diener eee reasoning, they should take freque £0 i me have adaptations for inducti® 4 equency information as input.”3. Reasoning by Tukano speakers 63 _What should one make of their claim that probabilities are so completely divorced from observation that it is conceptually impossible to consider that nature could produce any representational formats or reasoning procedures that implement them, but that frequencies exist at the level of observation? Cosmides and her associates presented this without any further justification, as though it were simply intuitively obvious. Their claim seems odd on reflection, however, when one realises that knowledge about frequencies, as well as about probabilities, requires the intervention of computation between observation and quantificational representation. Apart from the fact that the categorisation of events is a complicated business (no two hunts, successful or not, are identical), one needs some way of recording these categorised events in memory, as well as a way of counting these recorded events, if one is to know the frequency with which events of a certain sort have occurred. One should not confuse the ability to observe an event with the ability to observe the frequency of events that belong to the same category. It is straightforwardly obvious that one needs to compute a sum of events to have a frequency count for them. One therefore has no more right to claim that frequencies occur at the level of observation than to claim that probabilities occur at this level. Both require memory, ways of categorising, and computation. In this, both seem open to the sort of analysis that was provided by Hume about causation, which, as he pointed out, is inferred by the observer rather than observed directly in the event.' The computational difference that is involved in saying that 15 of 20 hunts were successful, rather than saying that 75% of the hunts were successful, is not great. The frequency description requires one to calculate the sums both for successful hunts (15) and unsuccessful hunts (5), to then add them together to obtain the denominator (that there were 20 hunts in all), and then place only the successful hunts in the numerator; only then can one know the frequency description, “15 out of 20.” The probability description ~ the single event probability of .75 is equal to 75% of hunts being successful ~ requires one additional computation, that is, dividing the numerator by the denominator to obtain .75. To claim, as Cosmides and her associates have, that the probability description requires computation, whereas the frequency description can be observed directly, is patently mistaken, Even though the theoretical argument presented by Cosmides and her associates is mistaken philosophically (see also Over, Chapter 4, this Volume), they have presented data that seem to support their contention that people solve Bayesian-reasoning problems when these are presented in | Hume (1737/1957) showed that causation does not exist in the observation af ‘an event, but is imposed on the event by the observer. Indeed, given Hume's analysis of causation, the argument made by Cosmides and her associates would lead to the conclusion that evolution could not have derived a way to represent causes in the human mind. We doubt that most readers would want to accept an argument that nature could have provided neither a way for the mind to represent causation nor a way to make causal inferences,64 O'Brien, Roazzi, Athias, Brandéo terms of frequency information, but not when presented in terms of prob. abilities of single events (e.g., Cosmides & Tooby, 1996; see also Gigerenzer & Hoffrage, 1995). This means that even when one dismisses their bioevolutionary argument, one still needs to deal with the empirical side of their presentation. Roazzi, O’Brien, and Dias (2003) showed, however, that there is a confound in the comparisons between frequency and probability versions of the Bayesian-reasoning problems presented by Cosmides and Tooby, and by Gigerenzer and Hoffrage, which can account for the reported differences. Roazzi et al. noted that the two sorts of problems consistently were presented with different response formats (“_%” for probability problems vs. “out of__” for frequency problems). When these response formats were balanced across problem types the advantage for frequency problems disappeared. We thus are not convinced by the published data that people are more apt to provide Bayesian answers to frequency-based than to probability-based problems. Some experiments with Tukano speakers in Brazilian Amazonia We have been engaged in an investigation of reasoning among speakers of the Tukano language in the Iauaraté district on the Rio Uaupés along the border between Brazil and Colombia. Iauaraté is in the Terra Indigena do Alto Rio Negro in the State of Amazonas in Brazil. Until recently this population lived in semi-nomadic groups as hunter/gatherers with some intermittent farming. In the past two to three decades they have been settling into communities largely supported by subsistence farming and fishing. The principal purpose of the project is to investigate deductive reasoning. Given the central place in the literature of the debates con- cerning the social-contract hypothesis and the putative representational and reasoning advantages of frequencies over probabilities, a large part of a trip to the Iauaraté district in 2004 was devoted to collection of data relevant to these issues. The Terra Indigena Alto Rio Negro is a reserved area that stretches west and north from the town of Sao Gabriel da Cachoeira on the Rio Negro to the Colombian border, with an area of 79,993 square kilometres (approxi- mately twice the size of Switzerland). The official population is only 14,599, that is, one person for each 5.5 square kilometres (FOIRN-ISA,- 2000). Access to the area is limited to the indigenous population, to government functionaries such as members of the Brazilian military and the federal police, and workers from FUNASA (the Brazilian federal ministry for health). Only a few researchers are given permits to travel there and the general Population is not permitted into the area. The trip from Sao Gabriel da Cachoeira to Iauaraté is approximately 375 km of river travel and can be accomplished in 12 hours when the rivers are full, using a small uncovered boat with an outboard motor, and three days during the dry3. Reasoning by Tukano speakers 65 fficult. Because of its inaccessibility to 's inhabitants are extremely isolated. speaking communities have learned to speak some Portuguese, have received some formal schooling provided by eS one sate aoespament, and have learned at least the rudiments ~ i guese literacy. Their daily communications, however, still take place almost exclusively in the Tukano language. Older members typically do not speak Portuguese beyond a rudimentary level, if at all, have not been exposed to any formal schooling, and do not have any literacy skills. Of course, there are exceptions, and some older members of the community are literate and conversant in Portuguese and some younger members are lacking in these skills. For the most part, however, the presence or absence of exposure to schooling is a function of age. Typically, both younger and older members of the community are multilingual, almost all of them speaking Tukano, and many speak three or more of the other local indigenous languages, including Miriti-Tapuia, Dessana, Tariano, Siriana, Piratapuia, Uanano, Hupde, Baré, and a scattering of others. Younger members, however, are far less likely to speak multiple indigenous languages. This situation allowed us to compare two types of participants — those with formal school experience and literacy skills versus those without ~ allowing an assessment of any possible effects of exposure to Western languages, or of schooling and literacy, on obtained judgments. We were also able to recruit three young male colleagues in their mid-twenties from the Tukano-speaking community in Jauaraté, fluent both in Tukano and in Portuguese. season when river travel is more di outside populations, the area and it Younger members of the Tukano- Experiment 1: Selection task problems The original plan was to present stimuli in a manner similar to what was reported by Sugiyama, Tooby, and Cosmides (2002) with the _Shiwiar population in Ecuadorian Amaz6nia, who were shown pictures with parts of them covered. This method was abandoned, however, as our participants demonstrated great confusion with that format. Our informants told us that theirs was an oral tradition, so we changed to a presentation that was entirely oral, and embedded the problems within a story context. , Two sets of problems were presented, and each participant received either a Social-Contract or an Indicative Problem Set. Each set contained two initial training and four subsequent experimental problems. The training problems introduced the scenario for the entire set, describing a man named Tapi, who recently travelled from his home village to the Land of the Sacred Forest, where he encountered some social rules that were different from those in his homeland, When he returned home he told his neighbours about these rules. For example, in the Land of the Sacred Forest if a man Bets help in building his house, he must kill a large animal called a tapir so that he can hold a big feast.Athias, Brandéo t sometimes people in the Land of the and we want to catch them. An initial ituation would show that someone is 66 O'Brien, Roazzi, The experimenter explained that Sacred Forest do not obey the rules, question asked, “So, tell me, what sit not obeying this rule?” For the training problems only, when participants gave a response that was unhelpful from our perspective, the experimenter asked, in a “hint” question, whether it would be helpful to find out whether someone did or did not get help building a house or whether someone did or did not kill a tapir in order to hold a big feast. Examples of “unhelpful” responses included using magic to find rule violators, or that we should ask people if they broke the rules. a ; For each problem, answers to the initial question were followed by asking four additional “selection task” questions (with question orders randomised across problems). Each began by reminding participants “we want to catch people who are not obeying the rule that if a man gets help in building his house, he must kill a large animal called a tapir so that he can hold a big feast.” This was followed by the question, “Imagine we find a man who did receive help constructing his home. Would this be a situation in which we might catch someone who is not obeying the rule? Why?” The other three questions asked about a man who did not receive help con- structing his home, a man who did kill a tapir, and a man who did not killa tapir. The four questions are analogous to showing the four cards, p, not p, q, and not q, respectively, in the traditional selection task, and requiring an individual evaluation for every card. The second Social-Contract training task, and the four experimental problems, were structurally the same: the second training task presented the rule that if a man goes hunting, he must wear a feathered head dress. The four experimental problems did not include any “hint” questions, and they presented the following rules. 1 Ifa man catches a ride on a boat on the Sacred River, he must give fish to the owner of the boat. 2 a man ion the meat from a wild pig as a gift, he must repay the 3 i A i gives a man a fishing net, he must carry her firewood in 4 Ma aia ieee amedicne man, that man must fast for two days bbe ieee Problems had the same structure. The first training problem spate a man named Dari who is well known by the people for saying are not true.” Dari and his cousin, Mohan, recently visited 2 2 Although Dari mi “ ws igh Dari might be a “cheater” in terms of a Gricean violation of expectations that he speaks the truth, these scenarios do Wolve social contracts per se, that is, ct not heating involve social contracts b3. Reasoning by Tukano speakers 67 place called the Land of the Sacred Forest, where the plants, animals, and objects differ from where they live. Dari told Mohan that in the Land of the Sacred Forest there is a type of tree called the Chacroma tree, and he said that if Mohan eats the fruit of the Chacroma tree, he will grow an extra (finger. Participants were told to assume that what Dari said was not true ‘and that we want to catch Dari in this lie. “So, tell me. What would show that what Dari said is not true? Remember Dari said that if Mohan eats the fruit of the Chacroma tree, he will grow an extra finger. What would show that this is not true?” Again, as in the practice problems for the Social- Contract Problem Set, the experimenter gave “hint” questions if the response to the initial question was not of the sort that we were seeking. The four final questions asked for each problem were presented in the following way. “Remember, we want to catch Dari in this lie. Dari said that if Mohan eats the fruit of the Chacroma tree, he will grow an extra finger. Imagine that Mohan does eat the fruit of the Chacroma tree. Would this be a situation in which we might catch Dari in his lie? Why?” The pattern for the three other questions was the same as described earlier for the Social- Contract Problem Set. The indicative statement for t travelled across the river, a snake woi four indicative experimental problems were as he second training task was if Mohan uld bite him. The conditionals for the follows. 1 If Mohan looks inside the red box that is in his room, he will find a large amount of money. 2. Ifa Jucu snake bites Mohan, he will die. 3. If Mohan eats the fruit of the Banira tree, he will get a big stomach ache. 4 Ifapregnant woman drinks the milk from a jaguar, she will have a son. .d either the Social-Contract Problem set or the Indicative Problem set, with the four experimental problems presented in random order after the two training ones. The problems were presented orally and administered individually. Participants were asked to repeat the tule or assertion Tapi or Dari had said, and the experimenter repeated the information when necessary until the participant demonstrated that it had been remembered correctly. Altogether, 34 illiterate Tukano speakers, 36 literate Tukano speakers, and 50 university students from New York City Participated. Each participant receive Results We turn first to the responses to thi falsify or violate the conditionals (see three populations, for both the Indica Was p and not-g, ranging from 49% to 7: e initial questions about what would Table 3.1). The modal response for all tive and the Social-Contract Problems, 2% of responses. In addition to the68 O'Brien, Roazzi, Athias, Brandao Table 3.1 Proportions of p and not q selection patterns for the selection task in 1, and the evaluation task in Experiment 2. Also, scores on the five. Experiment point scale for the probability and frequency problems in Experiment 3 Problem type Social contract Indicative ee Initial Follow-up Initial Follow-up question questions question questions Experiment 1 (Selection task) Illiterate Tukano 49 (.72) AS 72 (.78) 2» Literate Tukano 63 (.83) 26 .64 (.88) 29 University students .56 (.92) 38 .66 (.83) AT Experiment 2 (Evaluation task) Illiterate Tukano 83 -70 Literate Tukano 87 84 University students 90 85 Experiment 3 (Probability and frequency problems) Frequency Probability Initial Final Initial Final question question question question Illiterate Tukano 4.56 2.89 4.38 27 Literate Tukano 4.33 2.94 4.45 3.00 4.73 3.33 4.67 3.17 University students Proportions inside parentheses include participants who responded that they would select only p oF that they would select only not g. p and not q response, the two other most popular responses were for participants to respond by saying that they would check the p situation or that they would check the not q situation. When one adds these two responses to the selections of p and not q, between 72% and 92% of responses are accounted for, for both problem types and across all three groups, with no apparent differences between Social-Contract and Indicative Problem Sets. . We turn now to the responses to the four follow-up “selection task" questions. An initial ANOVA was computed with responses summed for each problem across the four questions, which revealed no differences among the problems, so we computed an ANOVA with responses summed across problems. The sole significant effect was for participant type FQ, 114) = 27.32, p < .01, with university students responding “yes” less often than either the illiterate or the literate Tukanos (proportions = .39, .58, and .63, respectively). This stemmed largely from a subset of university students who responded “no” to all four proposition types (on a total of 16% of3. Reasoning by Tukano speakers 69 problems versus only a single pro! . te apal students seemed to believe ‘oat tee ouitinetee a fee é sufficiently strange that they were not open to ordinary sorts of evaluation. This type of response was not found among the Tukano speakers, for whom the stimulus sentences were not so strange. (Indeed, the problems had been constructed within the context of Tukano society.) We now turn to the p and not q response pattern for each of the problem types for each of the three groups of participants, for the responses given when each proposition was questioned individually, after the initial ques- tion. This pattern was made by the illiterate Tukanos 15% and 29% of the time to the Social-Contract and Indicative Problems, respectively, by the literate Tukanos 26% and 29% of the time, and by the university students 38% and 47% of the time. An ANOVA revealed only a significant main effect for group, F(2, 114) = 7.20, p < 01, with university students demon- strating more p and not q responses than did either of the Tukano groups. Pre-planned t-tests revealed that all three groups made p and not q selec- tions more often than would be expected by chance alone (the chance proportion = .0625), with ¢ scores = 2.46, 3.46, and 6.78 for the illiterate Tukano, literate Tukano, and university groups, respectively. The ANOVA revealed neither a significant difference for problem type nor an interaction Overall, although all three groups of between group and problem type. 0 participants were more likely than chance to give p and not q responses, this tendency was more pronounced for the university students. This may reflect that the university students were more accustomed to taking tests, or more likely to set aside pragmatically based inferences. ; The superior performance on the initial questions, in comparison to the subsequent selection-task questions, requires some reflection. Even though logically appropriate p wnses occurred at above-chance levels and not q respo! for both social-contract and indicative problems, both for the initial question and for the follow-up “selection task” questions, there were far fewer such responses on the “selection task” questions. For illiterate Tukano speakers, for example, 49% gave p and not q as an answer to the initial questions for the indicative problems, but only 29% provided such responses to the follow-up questions for the same problems. Clearly, ‘the subsequent “selection task” questions were less apt to reveal an appropriate understanding of what can falsify or violate a conditional than were the initial questions. One speculative possibility is that repeated questioning on the same problem might have Jed some people to question whether their initial answer was correct, and then to seek an alternative response. Perhaps People can be forced to “over-think” on these problems when questioned Tepeatedly. Whatever the reason, the tendency to provide logically more appropriate responses on the initial questions was found for all three types of participants. None of this should divert the reader, however, from realising that all three groups of participants revealed a basic, appropriate, and equal ability to understand what violates a conditional social contractand what falsifies an indicative conditional. Most importantly, in the con- text of the theoretical issues the study was intended to assess, there was no indication that the problems in the Social-Contract Set were better under. stood than the problems in the Indicative Set. Experiment 2: Evaluation task problems The problems here used what Evans (1982) and O’Brien and Overton (1982) referred to as an evaluation task, presenting conditionals together with four exemplars of the forms p and q, p and not q, not p and q, and not p and not q, asking participants to identify which one of the forms falsified an indicative conditional, or violated a conditional social contract. Evaluation tasks were presented because, in our experience, they are easier than the selection task. We wanted to present maximally simple opportunities for the three populations to identify violating and falsifying instances for social- contract and indicative conditionals, respectively. A total of 10 social-contract and 10 indicative problems were con- structed. We turn first to the Social-Contract Set, which included five problems that had clear benefit/cost rules and five that did not, but that presented conditional obligations.” The Social-Contract Problem Set was presented with a short vignette that introduced a man named Tari, who made a long trip to many strange places. When he returned to his home village he told his neighbours about the social rules that he encountered when in the Land of the Sacred Forest and that, although the people in this land had these rules, they did not always behave in the way they ought. The participants were told that they would hear about some of these rules and would be asked to choose which picture from among a set would show the person who was not obeying the rule. Each problem presented its rule twice for emphasis, once in conditional one and a second time in universal form. For example, one benefit/cost Pret sarmeae ~ is a rule in the Land of the Sacred Forest that if a Fee eae ati arent fe must pay the owner of the boat with bananas boaliaiowner bananaar aa man gets a ride in a boat he must pay the then showed four picts fa Problem Presented the conditional rule and apis ote out ouures that illustrated situations for p and q, not p and : Q P and not q; each problem presented the pictures in a ia ere pass P eeipanta were instructed to point to the picture 4 ne violating the rule. T] it rules stated, “if a man is treated bya he other four cost/benefit man a basket,” “if by a medicine man he must give the medicine » lf a man is given arrows to go hunting, he must give @ 3 We thought it would be of interest to di scover whether problems with clear be ji ffer fr ‘ ; ules of the sort outlined i a (1985). No differences were found between these Tope ore ‘Cheng and Holyoa!3. Reasoning by Tukano speakers 7\ parrot in return to the man who gave him the arrows,” “ia man is given the a tapir, he must climb a tree to get honey,” “4 is ‘ven a fishing net b y,” and “if a man is given 8 | y a woman, he must carry her firewood.” The rules f the five conditional obligation problems were, “if a man dance: bea “ ne rainbow he must paint his face red,” “if a woman is widowed, she amt r a tattoo on her face,” “if a woman is pregnant she must wear a red necklace,” “if a hunter carries a tapir he must wear a feathered head dress called a cocar,” and “if a man plays drums, he must wear a green hat.” The 10 Indicative Problems had the same structure as the Social-Contract Problems, although with a different opening vignette. Participants were told about a man named Tipi who visited the Land of the Sacred Forest. When he returned to his own village he told his neighbours many strange facts about what he had seen. His neighbours, however, knew Tipi to be a man who tended to say things that were not true. Participants were instructed to point to the picture that showed that what he was saying this time was not true. The ten indicative problems presented the following conditional assertions: “if a woman has children she always is bald,” “if a man is playing drums he always is wearing a green hat,” “if a man is hunting, he always is wearing a feather hat,” “if someone sees a lightning, that person always covers his eyes,” “if a man is not married, his house always has a red door,” “if a village has (a large communal house), it always has a cow,” “if a house has a green door, it always has two windows,” “if a canoe transports five passengers, it always has a motor,” “if a man is wearing sandals, he always wears a hat,” and “if a house has a metal roof, it always has a red roof.” As with the Social-Contract Problems, each Indicative conditional was presented twice, one in conditional form and then immedi- ately in universal form. Each participant receive the set of Indicative Problems. the Indicative Problems and 17 tl Tukano speakers received the In Contract Problems, and 27 univers! New York received the Indicative Problems. d either the set of Social-Contract Problems or Eighteen illiterate Tukano speakers received he Social-Contract Problems, 22 literate dicative Problems and 24 the Social- ity students from the City University of Problems and 27 the Social-Contract Results ns were for the picture showing p and not q (84%, with only 3%, 8%, and 4% for p and q, not p and 4 and not p and not q, respectively, see Table 3.1). These responses ranged from 70% for the illiterate Tukanos on Social-Contract Problems to 90% for university students with Indicative Problems. Thus, independently of population tested or of type of problem, the P derstood that p and not q articipants understo p anc was the exemplar type that was relevant to falsifying or violating the Conditionals. The vast majority of selectior72. O'Brien, Roazzi, Athias, Brandao ses were computed using only the data for the p and not q selec. oss the 10 problems to yield a maximum score of 10 per participant. The ANOVA yielded a significant main effect for group, F(2, 129) = 7.81, p < 01, with the illiterate Tukanos making fewer p and not q selections than did both of the two literate groups, and g significant main effect for problem type, F(1, 129) = 9.62, p < .01, with the social-contract problems leading to fewer p and not q responses than did the indicative problems. The interaction of problem type x participant type was not significant, F(1, 129) = 1.72, p > 05. Given that all three parti- cipant types overwhelmingly preferred selection of the p and not q instances on all problems, the difference between the illiterate Tukano group and the two literate groups seemed to stem only from the less experience the illiterate participants had at test taking. Indeed, all three participant types tended to make p and not q selections for both types of problem, and the difference between the two concerns only a slightly larger tendency to choose p and not q instances for the indicative problems than the social contract problems. This is counter-evidence to the social-contract theory, although an absence of any difference also would have been evidence against it. Social-contract theory predicted that the social-contract prob- lems would have the most p and not q responses. Analy: tions, which were summed acr: Experiment 3 We turn now to the claim that bioevolutionary history provided humans with an ability to represent and reason about event frequencies, but not about the probabilities of single events. The modal error reported in the literature, for the sorts of Bayesian reasoning problems that have been presented, is “base-rate neglect,” which can be illustrated with the proto- typical problem in the literature - the taxicab problem (Kahneman & Tversky, 1972; Bar-Hillel, 1980). Participants are told about a city that has two taxicab companies, with a Blue Cab Company having 15% of the cabs and a Green Cab Company the remaining 85%. A cab is involved in an accident and a witness who is accurate 80% of the time identifies it as blue. Participants tend to judge the probability that the cab in the accident is blue as .80, thus apparently ignoring the base rate that only 15% of the cabs in the City are blue. Someone constructing a Bayesian line of reasoning would compute the ratio of the probability of a cab being correctly identified as blue, divided by the probability of any cab being identified as blue (i-¢., blue cabs correctly identified plus green cabs incorrectly identified) (= .12/[-12 + -17] = .41). Similar findings of base-rate neglect have been reported for problems that presented medical tests for a disease (e.g., Cosmides & Tooby, 1996; Gigerenzer & Hoffrage, 1995) or diagnosis of mechanical problems (e.g., Birnbaum & Mellors, 1983), Bayes’s theorem, of course, applies across all sorts of content in situ- ations other than those in which a witness (or a test) identifies an accident3. Reasoning by Tukano speakers 73 (or a disease). Indeed, ili coloured beads of various dpa ant ions textbook iy apt fo present for example, about the probability that a circular be one aad thew to ask, gator wants to assess whether experimental a ead is red. If an investi- “base-rate neglect,” one need: participants are able to resist 7 eds only to assess whether they adjust their judgments about a probability following the introducti f the tion that makes a judgment conditional. For example, iim ‘sine aires an array of beads, most of which are red, but with afew that ae geen, We ask a participant to judge the probability that a randomly selected bead is red, and they report that the probability is very high. We then point out that most of the red beads are triangles, and only a few of the red beads are circles, whereas most of the green beads are circles. We now ask our eeciyets what the probability is that a randomly selected circular bead is I participants now respond that the (conditional) probability that the circular bead is red is lower than was their original (non-conditional) judgment about its probability, we have found that they are not exhibiting base-rate neglect, but that they have exhibited Bayesian conditional reasoning in considering the base rates of colours and shapes of the beads. Note also that the demonstration of Bayesian reasoning in this hypo- thetical example would have been made on a problem presented without any numerical information, and without requiring a numerical response; all the information about probabilities in this example was presented using non- numerical quantifier terms. During debriefings of undergraduate college students in previous studies, they often told us that the problems are difficult because they do not remember from classroom mathematics teach- ing, or have not yet learned, how to perform them. These students thus seemed to think that they were being tested about what they have learned in mathematics classes rather than being assessed for their psychological intuitions, We believe that such beliefs about the problems, when they are numerically presented, make them a poor way to assess basic intuitions about probabilities. Ferreira (2003) therefore conducted a study at the Felerat University of Pernambuco in Recife, Brazil, that replaced the numbers in the problems with non-numerical quantifier terms. For example, the numerical information in the standard taxicab problem was replaced with “most of the cabs in the city are green and only a few of them are blue,” and “the witness correctly identified the blue taxicab most of the time and ‘misidentified the colour of the green taxicabs only once-in-a-while.” Both the numerical and the non-numerical problems used five-point Likert- numerical terms in one scale to be matched with type scales, allowing the Se ae non-numerical terms in the other scale (¢ ‘the probability is more than 20%" was matched with “the probability is extremely high”), Extensive pretesting was conducted, which demonstrated that the numerical and non- numerical descriptions were understood as conveying basically the same information, and results on the final experiment showed no differences between numerical and non-n | presentations. This showed that one yumerical74 O’Brien, Roazzi, Athias, Brandao can legitimately assess Bayesian reasoning without Presenting numerically based “‘maths problems,” so that populations that have no schooling in i are it te, can be tested. mathematics, and thus are innumerate, In the present experiment, two problems were constructed, one that presented information in terms of provabiliies and a or judgments about the probabilities of single events, and the other : Presented information in terms of event frequencies and asked for judgments about the frequencies of events. Of course, if the theoretical ; Proposals of Cosmides and her colleagues are correct, that human bioevolutionary history has provided representational formats and reasoning processes for frequencies and not for the probabilities of single events, then the frequency problems ought to be the easier. Both problems referred to canoe races between two men, one of whom had a reputation as a good racer, and the other of whom had a reputation as a poor racer. Each problem had two parts: an initial part in which only the skill of the racer was mentioned as a factor in predicting race outcomes, and a final part in which an additional factor of boat length was intro- duced. Base-rate neglect would be indicated to the extent that judgments were not adjusted as the new information was introduced, that is, as the problems came to require a judgment about a conditional probability. For the probability problem, the experimenter explained that in the village of Inca Rapids the people often hold canoe races on which people often gamble. The canoes are always 7 or 8 m in length, and 8 m boats are faster and more likely to win. Two men, Moligon the Good Racer and Kiniwi the Weak Racer sometimes race canoes. Both men weigh the same — 190 pounds — but Moligon the Good Racer is more athletic, muscular, strong and, most importantly, as is shown by his nickname, he is a very good racer of canoes. Kiniwi the Weak Racer is very different. He is sedentary, flabby, weak, and most importantly, he is not a very good racer of canoes. The initial question about the canoe race was as follows: “So, if Moligon and Kiniwi have a canoe race, and both men use 8 m canoes, who is more likely to win the race? Moligon or Kiniwi? Or are the two men equally likely to finish at the same time?” If a participant said that one or the other of the two men was more likely to win, the experimenter asked whether thi ‘3 ittle more likely to win the race or much more likely to win. This method of asking the question allowed the response to Fe scored sg a five-point scale where 1 = Kiniwi is much more lik in, 2 = Kiniwi is a little more likely to win, 3 = the t ore likely to win, 2 = Kiniwi is Moligon isa little more likely 1o win, and Sr Nig ely to win. ee in, and 5 = Moligon is much more likely After . are raeslic gees Gee experimenter said that at times there one racer using a 7 m canoe and the ts lse canoes of different sizes, with identical in quality, materials, shape, fired an 8 m canoe. The canoes are in the length, with a canoe of 8 m bei weight, and the only difference is eing much faster than a canoe of 7 m.3. Reasoning by Tukano speakers 75 een i. ea be another race between Moligon the Good Racer and acer. This time Moligon is going to race using a slow canoe of 7 m and Kiniwi is going to use a fast canoe of 8 m. The , id and final question then was posed as follows. “So, if Molij on the Good Racer and Kiniwi the Weak Racer have a race when Moligon uses a much slower canoe and Kiniwi uses a much faster canoe, who is more likely to win the race? Moligon or Kiniwi, or are they both likely to finish at tbs same time?” The same follow-up questions were used so that the response could be scored using the same five-point scale. The frequency version of the problem was identical except that all refer- ences to probabilities were replaced with references to frequencies. For example, an 8 m canoe usually wins, a good racer wins a vast majority of his races, and the two questions referred to the two men having many races and asked who would win more of them, and if one racer was predicted to be the winner of more races, a judgment then was required as the whether this would be only a few more races or many more races. For all three populations — literate and illiterate Tukano speakers and City University of New York undergraduate students — the problems were administered individually and orally. Participants were asked to repeat each piece of information until the experimenter was satisfied that it had been heard and remembered, and participants were asked to explain each response. Eighteen illiterate Tukano speakers were presented the prob- ability problem and 21 the frequency problem. Eighteen literate Tukano speakers were presented the probability problem and 20 the frequency problem. Thirty-six university students in New York City were presented the probability problem, and 33 the frequency problem. Results The means for the initial question were 4.58 and 4.53 for the frequency and hereas the means for the final question probability versions, respectively, w [que Were 3.33 and 3.17, respectively (see Table 3.1). The only significant difference was between the initial and final questions, F(1, 140) = 320.01, p< .01 (means = 4.56 and 3.06 for the initial and final problems, respec- tively), showing that all three groups were sensitive to the need to adjust their answers based on the additional conditional information. The con- sistent tendency for both types of problems, and for all three populations, was to adjust the judgments in a way that was appropriate for Bayesian reasoning. No differences between groups occurred, nor were there any differences between frequency and probability forms of the problems, thus isconfirming the notion that reasoning about frequencies would be easier than reasoning about probabilities. All three of the populations tested thus showed no indication of base-rate neglect on either problem type, demon- strating judgments that were appropriate from a Bayesian perspective.76 O'Brien, Roazzi, Athias, Branddo Discussion in Experiments 1 and 2, with an uneducated ang iterate indigenous population in the Amazon basin, as well as with two educated and literate populations, are unlike the data that were reporteq Sugiyama et al. (2002) with an uneducated illiterate Amazonian population, aa by Cosmides (1989) and Fiddick et al. (2000) with ne literate populations. Whereas Cosmides and her associates ae that people can identify violators of social contracts but cannot identi ry counterexamples for conditional assertions, data from our Experiments 1 and 2 did not reveal any differences between the two types of problem. All three of the populations we tested favoured instances of p and not q as evidence for social-contract and indicative problems equally. Why do our data show people identifying instances of p and not q as falsifiers of conditional assertions when the studies presented by Cosmides and her associates showed that people did not do so? We suspect that the indicative problems in the experiments reported here succeeded because (1) we made them equal to the social-contract problems in interest and interpretability, which was not the case in the previously reported experiments, and (2) we made explicit the requirement to find falsifying information in the indicative problems. Just as the social-contract problems always have made the task of finding violators obvious, we made the task of finding falsifying evidence obvious; indeed, the scenarios emphasised the likelihood that the indicative conditionals were false. In brief, the problems we presented were devoid of extraneous disadvantages for the indicative problems that one finds in most of the literature (see also Noveck, Mercier, & van der Henst, Chapter 2, this volume). In Experiment 3, all three of the populations were able to resist the base- rate fallacy when presented with Bayesian reasoning problems, with no differences between problems presented in frequency versus probability formats. Once again, one can ask why our problems resulted in responses that were equally appropriate for probability and for frequency versions when previous studies (e.g., Cosmides & Tooby, 1996; Gigerenzer & Hoffrage, 1995) had reported significant differences. First, as was shown by Roazzi et al. (2003), the findings reported in previous studies had different response formats for probability versus frequency formatted problems, and when these were removed, the differences between’ problem types dis- on dee No such confounds existed in the present experiment. Addition- : y, Ameer Presented in Experiment 3 removed the “mathematical” and probebilatioe ae by presenting information about frequencies Without these extrancous sanetical quantifier terms in place of numbers. people revealed were ap 7 rue a the problems, the intuitions that The data presented in ess ¥ en identical for the two problem a reported by previous investigators both for Wee gn esate tat the inci gators both for Wason’s selection task and for The data presented i3. Reasoning by Tukano speakers 77 Bayesian reasoning tasks are interpretable as artifacts of particular task features that were extraneous to the issues of theoretical interest (see also Roberts, Chapter 1, this volume). . In evaluating evolutionary explanations offered by biologists for func- tional anatomy, Rosen (1982) commented that such explanations are constrained only by the inventiveness of those who author them, and by the gullibility of their audience. Gray, Heaney, and Fairhall (2003) came to a similar conclusion about explanations by evolutionary psychologists gener- ally, and we extend the precaution to evolutionary explanations offered about reasoning processes in particular. We think of at least some bio- evolutionary explanations as instances of a “Little Red Riding Hood” approach to evolutionary explanation, where one assumes that the wolf has big eyes so that it can see Little Red Riding Hood better. Of course, the folk tale never considers other possibilities as reasons for a wolf to have big eyes, such as making the wolf more attractive to wolves of the opposite sex. It also leaves unanswered why large eyes per se would improve a wolf’s eyesight, much less why the improved eyesight is specific for seeing Little Red Riding Hood. The fact that Cosmides and her associates (e.g., Cosmides, 1989; Cosmides & Tooby, 1994, 1996; Fiddick et al., 2000; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992) have reported that people tended to solve versions of Wason’s selection task when presented with social contracts, but did not do so with other sorts of conditionals, did not entail that evolution has provided humans with special reasoning modules for identifying violators of social contracts, any more than the wolf’s big eyes were designed specifically for seeing Little Red Riding Hood; nor do such findings justify a conclusion that evolution has not provided any content-general logical reasoning processes any more than the folk tale eliminated other possible reasons for evolution having resulted in a wolf’s big eyes. A similar caution should be extended to interpreting data purportedly showing that people are able to reason about frequencies but not about probabilities. As we have noted elsewhere (e.g., Noveck & O’Brien, 1996; O’Brien et al., 2004; Roazzi et al., 2003), it is parsimonious to explain such findings as resulting from artifacts of the particular features of the experiments, but not as resulting from the bioevolutionary history of our species. The data for the three experiments Teported here support this conclusion. Claims that content-dependent processes dominate human reasoning have become fashionable in recent years also among researchers who have not adopted the sorts of bioevolutionary arguments presented by Cosmides and her associates (e.g., Cheng & Holyoak, 1985; Evans, 1982). We suspect, however, that if such content-dependent claims were being made about language processing rather than about thinking and reasoning, they would Rot find such ready acceptance. Most readers would agree, we think, that ordinary sentence comprehension relies on knowledge about a sentence’s Content, but the fact that people take content into account is evidence78 O'Brien, Roazzi, Athias, Branddo neither that all linguistic judgments are governed only by content- dependent processes, nor that content-general processes have no place of importance in linguistics. We reject the notion that there is no place in linguistics for a content-general theory of syntax because we recognise that many of our linguistic judgments are best understood in terms of such processes. We also reject an argument that there is no place in the psychology of thinking and reasoning for a content-general theory because many human reasoning judgments are likewise best understood in terms of content-general processes. Because of space limitations we shall not describe here the evidence for reasoning judgments that cannot be explained without reference to a set of content-general logical inference processes; we refer the reader to Braine and O’Brien (1998) and O’Brien (2004), which provided reviews of empirical evidence for logic judgments that cannot be explained in terms of problem content. Given that the cognitive notion of modularity was introduced with the proposal of a linguistic module that applies across all sorts of semantic content (e.g., Chomsky, 1988; Fodor, 1983), proposals that modularity implies narrowly defined content domains in human reasoning are ironic. The concept of modularity carries with it, of course, a notion of code specificity that applies to input, processing, and output. For example, a language module is constrained so as to take only linguistic input and provide only linguistic output. The notion of specificity, however, can be applied narrowly or broadly. Pragmatic-reasoning-schemas theory (e.g., Cheng & Holyoak, 1985) describes rules that apply only to the extremely limited content of pragmatic actions and preconditions; social-contract theory provides a checking algorithm that applies only to the extremely limited content of social costs and benefits. These two theories thus are at the narrow end of a spectrum of content specificity. At the broad end of this spectrum one can find mental-logic theories that propose inference processes that are not constrained by content. Mental-logic theory proposes representational specificity in that input is limited to propositional strings, but it allows the propositions to express any sort of content. (The broad end of the spectrum also includes the content-general mental-models theory of Johnson-Laird and his associates, ¢.g., Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 2002, although that theory does not constrain its input to propositional strings.) Clearly, there would be a bioevolutionary advantage for a species to have inference-making processes that apply without constraints on the kinds of content to which they can apply, so that as new domains of content are encountered, the same inference processes can be applied. In the absence of any inference-making process that can be applied across content domains, 4 reasoner either would need to acquire new processes, or would not be able to make inferences when new domains were encountered. The bioevolu- tionary advantage for a species to have some content-general inference processes is obvious; such processes would allow adaptation when environ- mental changes are encountered (see O'Brien, 1993, for further discussion3. Reasoning by Tukano speakers 79 on this point). 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