Conditional reasoning and the Wason selection task: Biconditional interpretation instead of reasoning bias

Two experiments were conducted to show that the IF... THEN... rules used in the different versions of Wason's (1966) selection task are not psychologically-though they are logically-equivalent. Some of these rules are considered by the participants as strict logical conditionals, whereas others are interpreted as expressing a biconditional relationship. A deductive task was used jointly with the selection task to show that the original abstract rule is quite ambiguous in this respect, contrary to deontic rules: the typical "error" made by most people may indeed be explained by the fact that they consider the abstract rule as a biconditional. Thus, there is no proper error or bias in the selection task as it is still argued, but a differential interpretation of the rule. The need for taking into account a pragmatic component in the process of reasoning is illustrated by the experiments.