Detecting Cheaters | Hacker News Reader

Detecting Cheaters

schneier.com

10 pointslogic3 comments

One confounding variable might be that strange, arbitrary rules cause too much cognitive dissonance (distracting, tangential thoughts) for the test subjects to apply their reasoning skills effectively. When the the rule is more like something one would find in the real world, people would be free to concentrate on the reasoning.

We therefore need to think of a 'real life' rules that's equivalent but does not involve cheating... like

    If you became a lawyer, you went to law school.

    If you didn't go to law school, you're not a lawyer.

    Test:

    [Is a lawyer] [Is a doctor] [Went to medical school] [Went to law school]

Actually, looking at it, there seems to be something counter-intuitive about the phrasing anyway. We usually would clarify by saying something like 'all lawyers started in law school, but not all law students managed to become practicing lawyers.' All calls to the subclass were dispatched from the parent, but the parent could have dispatched the call to a different subclass as it is polymorphic.

That's why there were experiments with different wording of the problems. All of the logical setups and solutions are identical (when expressed in abstract P/Q, true/false), but some problem domains (took a plane) is a lot more difficult for average people to comprehend than others (ate the vegetables).

This is not in the article (I'm just familiar with the exercise), but people are also much better at dealing with logic when the questions are about legal drinking age.

Well would that not go against the findings then? - legal drinking age is not related to cheating or evolved habits to combat cheating. It would seem that the rule being sensible is more important than it being about cheating.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com