Sunday, November 29, 2009

I think I've had too much "enrichment"

From this weekend's Globe and Mail:

Bob is in a bar, looking at Susan. But she is looking at Pablo. Bob is married. Pablo is not.

Is a married person looking at an unmarried person? The answer could be (a) yes, (b) no or (c) cannot be determined.

Give this problem a shot before you keep reading, but don't feel badly if you get it wrong.

Roughly 80 per cent of people choose (c), but it is not the correct answer, says Keith Stanovich, a professor of human development and applied psychology at the University of Toronto.

[...]

If Susan is married, then a married person is looking at an unmarried person (Pablo) . If she is single, then Bob, a married guy, is looking at an unwed woman. Either way, the answer to the question is yes: A married person is looking at an unmarried one.


I did get it wrong, but not for the reasons the article proposes. I got it wrong because I have never in my life been asked a logic problem of this style in which I have had to apply real-world information (in this case, the fact that Susan must necessarily be either married or unmarried) to the elements of the problem.

Many IQ test questions and many of the questions in the enrichment activities I had to do in elementary school in my capacity as a "gifted" student are structured like this, but the nature of the elements is irrelevant. For example: "All shirts are green. My dog is green. Therefore, my dog is a shirt: true or false?" The fact that my dog is clearly not a shirt is irrelevant; they're testing my ability to logic out the fact that just because all Xs are Y, something that is Y isn't necessarily an X. Another possibility would be "All shirts are green. My dog is a shirt. Therefore, my dog is green: true or false?" The answer there would be "true", despite the fact that in reality my dog is clearly not a shirt.

Based on the structure of the Bob/Susan/Pablo question, I was expecting a dog/shirt type question. It never even occurred to me that I might be expected to take human reality into account, because I have never before been expected to take human reality into account when answering this kind of question.

(Interestingly, all the enrichment activities etc. led me to know exactly what to expect in the little quiz at the end of that article. I didn't even have to think about it - I rattled off the answers like you'd rattle off your times tables.)

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