EVOKING THE PERMISSION SCHEMA - THE IMPACT OF EXPLICIT NEGATION AND AVIOLATION-CHECKING CONTEXT

Cheng and Holyoak (1985) proposed that realistic reasoning in deontic contexts is based on pragmatic schemas such as those for assessing com pliance with or violation of permission and obligation rules, and that the evocation of these schemas can facilitate performance in Wason's (1966) selection task. The inferential rules in such schemas are inter mediate in generality between the content-independent rules proposed b y logicians and specific cases stored in memory. In one test of their theory, Cheng and Holyoak demonstrated that facilitation could be obta ined even for an abstract permission rule that is devoid of concrete t hematic content. Jackson and Griggs (1990) argued on the basis of seve ral experiments that such facilitation is not due to evocation of a pe rmission schema, but, rather, results from a combination of presentati on factors: the presence of explicit negatives in the statement of cas es and the presence of a violation-checking context. Their conclusion calls into question both the generality of content effects in reasonin g and the explanation of these effects. We note that Jackson and Grigg s did not test whether the same combination of presentation factors wo uld produce facilitation for an arbitrary rule that does not involve d eontic concepts, as their proposal would predict. The present study te sted this prediction. Moreover, we extended Jackson and Griggs' compar isons between performance with an abstract permission rule versus an a rbitrary rule, introducing clarifications in the statement of each. No facilitation was observed for an arbitrary rule even when explicit ne gatives and a violation-checking context were used, whereas strong fac ilitation was found for the abstract permission rule under the same co nditions. Performance on the arbitrary rule was not improved even when the instructions indicated that the rule was conditional rather than biconditional. In contrast, a small but reliable degree of facilitatio n was obtained for the abstract permission rule, with violation-checki ng content even in the absence of explicit negatives. The theory of pr agmatic reasoning schemas can account for both the present findings an d those reported by Jackson and Griggs.