Jsbt. Evans et De. Over, RATIONALITY IN THE SELECTION TASK - EPISTEMIC UTILITY VERSUS UNCERTAINTY REDUCTION, Psychological review, 103(2), 1996, pp. 356-363
M. Oaksford and N. Chater (1994) presented a Bayesian analysis of the
Wason selection task in which they proposed that people choose cards i
n order to maximize expected information gain (EIG) as measured by red
uction in uncertainty in the Shannon-Weaver information theory sense.
It is argued that the EIG measure is both psychologically implausible
and normatively inadequate as a measure of epistemic utility (i.e., th
e value of knowledge to the individual). The article is also concerned
with the descriptive account of findings in the selection task litera
ture offered by Oaksford and Chater. First, it is shown that their ana
lysis data reported in the recent article of K. N. Kirby (1994) is uns
ound; second, an EIG analysis is presented of the experiments of P. Po
llard and J St BT Evans (1983) that provides a strong empirical discon
firmation of the theory.