Evoking the Permission Schema: The Impact of Explicit Negation and a Violation-Checking Context

Abstract

Cheng and Holyoak (1985) proposed that realistic reasoning in deontic contexts is based on pragmatic schemas such as those for assessing compliance with or violation of permission and obligation rules, and that the evocation of these schemas can facilitate performance in Wason's (1966) selection task. The inferential rules in such schemas are intermediate in generality between the content-independent rules proposed by logicians and specific cases stored in memory. In one test of their theory, Cheng and Holyoak demonstrated that facilitation could be obtained even for an abstract permission rule that is devoid of concrete thematic content. Jackson and Griggs (1990) argued on the basis of several experiments that such facilitation is not due to evocation of a permission schema, but, rather, results from a combination of presentation factors: the presence of explicit negatives in the statement of cases and the presence of a violation-checking context. Their conclusion calls into question both the generality of content effects in reasoning and the explanation of these effects. We note that Jackson and Griggs did not test whether the same combination of presentation factors would produce facilitation for an arbitrary rule that does not involve deontic concepts, as their proposal would predict. The present study tested this prediction. Moreover, we extended Jackson and Griggs’ comparisons between performance with an abstract permission rule versus an arbitrary rule, introducing clarifications in the statement of each. No facilitation was observed for an arbitrary rule even when explicit negatives and a violation-checking context were used, whereas strong facilitation was found for the abstract permission rule under the same conditions. Performance on the arbitrary rule was not improved even when the instructions indicated that the rule was conditional rather than biconditional. In contrast, a small but reliable degree of facilitation was obtained for the abstract permission rule, with violation-checking content even in the absence of explicit negatives. The theory of pragmatic reasoning schemas can account for both the present findings and those reported by Jackson and Griggs.