Is the brain hard-wired in such a way to do logic, or do we have to learn it laboriously, tediously, and excruciatingly? The Wason Selection Task, given to thousands of students and professors, sheds some light on the question. The findings are that when a problem is given in the abstract logical form, almost everyone gets it wrong, but when a story accompanies the identical logical form, almost everyone gets it right (even students who hate logic). The content of the story had to do with cheating, i.e. someone trying to take the benefit without paying the cost. Apparently, our standard mental equipment includes 'cheater detectors', and, presumably, other mental mechanisms to handle contentful logics, but not bare logic.
