Day 19 of 150 Logic Difficulty 3/10
People test hypotheses by confirming, not falsifying
Quick answer
People test hypotheses by confirming, not falsifying. Today's question (Confirmation bias) asks about a finding from Wason, P. C. in 1960. The correct option is Looking for cases that confirm — full explanation, primary source, and glossary cross-links below.
Today's question
Wason's 2-4-6 number-rule experiment showed that people primarily test their hypotheses by:
Reveal the answer and explanation
Correct: B — Looking for cases that confirm
Wason (1960) gave participants the triple "2, 4, 6" and asked them to discover the underlying rule by proposing additional triples. The rule was simply "any ascending sequence." Most participants generated narrow hypotheses ("evens ascending by 2") and tested only confirming cases — never trying triples that would falsify their guess. The study is the founding empirical demonstration of what we now call confirmation bias.
About the source
Wason, P. C. (1960). On the failure to eliminate hypotheses in a conceptual task. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12(3), 129–140.
Every Cognition Bible question cites a primary source — a paper, book chapter, or monograph that exists, that we can point to on Google Scholar, and whose finding the question accurately summarizes. No fabricated authority strings, no name-drops without paper-level grounding.
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