Unit 5 - Perspectives and biases

Practical activity

Here is a famous logic task for you to warm up with. A similar task was formulated in 1966 by the psychologist Peter Wason, who used it as part of an experiment on reasoning (2). Imagine that 4 cards are lying on the table in front of you. Every card has the name of a fruit or animal printed on one side and the colour red or grey on the other. As they appear in front of you, 2 cards show the name of a fruit or animal. The other 2 cards show a colour.  

The 4 cards appear as illustrated below. Your task is to decide if the following rule is true: 

If a card has the name of a fruit printed on one side, then it has the colour red on the other side.

Which card(s) do you need to turn over to find out whether the rule is true or false? Only turn over the minimum number of cards necessary to determine if the rule is true.

Tip: To organize your thinking about the correct answer, you may want to review your learning about conditional statements in Module 4 and draw a tree diagram for the logic task in this example.

Once you have thought your answer through, click on reveal to check your answers.