

Detecting Cheaters - logic
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/04/detecting_cheat_2.html

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Tycho
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.

~~~
oniTony
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.

~~~
Tycho
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._

