Distrust and the positive test heuristic: Dispositional and situated social distrust improves performance on the Wason Rule Discovery Task.

Abstract

Feelings of distrust alert people not to take information at face value, which may influence their reasoning strategy. Using the Wason (1960) rule identification task, we tested whether chronic and temporary distrust increase the use of negative hypothesis testing strategies suited to falsify one's own initial hunch. In Study 1, participants who were low in dispositional trust were more likely to engage in negative hypothesis testing than participants high in dispositional trust. In Study 2, trust and distrust were induced through an alleged person-memory task. Paralleling the effects of chronic distrust, participants exposed to a single distrust-eliciting face were 3 times as likely to engage in negative hypothesis testing as participants exposed to a trust-eliciting face. In both studies, distrust increased negative hypothesis testing, which was associated with better performance on the Wason task. In contrast, participants' initial rule generation was not consistently affected by distrust. These findings provide first evidence that distrust can influence which reasoning strategy people adopt.

Something smells fishy: Olfactory suspicion cues improve performance on the Moses illusion and Wason rule discovery task

“…As is common for the Wason task, all but two participants generated a "+2" or "even-numbers" rule. This is consistent with Mayo et al (2014), who also observed no effect of distrust on hypothesis generation.…”

“…From this perspective, incidental olfactory cues of metaphorical relevance elicit feelings of distrust, as previously observed in the context of economic trust games (Lee & Schwarz, 2012). These feelings convey that something may be wrong, prompting people to attend to how things might differ from what meets the eye, as previously observed when distrust was induced through social manipulations (Schul, Mayo, & Burnstein, 2008;Mayo et al, 2014). Importantly, however, neither a social induction of distrust nor a social task are necessary to observe the cognitive benefits of a distrustful mindset, as the present studies illustrate.…”

“…Moreover, people in a distrustful mindset are more likely to entertain alternative interpretations of utterances (Fein, 1996; A C C E P T E D M A N U S C R I P T ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT SUSPICION & COGNITIVE PROCESSING 5 Burnstein, & Bardi, 1996) and to generate more unusual solutions on creativity tasks (Mayer & Mussweiler, 2011). Furthermore, Mayo, Alfasi, and Schwarz (2014) reported that distrust improves performance on Wason's (1960) rule discovery task by increasing the prevalence of negative hypothesis testing. Collectively, these findings suggest that distrust fosters critical thinking by directing attention to how things might differ from what meets the eye.…”

The conflict mindset: How internal conflicts affect self‐regulation

“…Concurring with findings described above, the activation of distrust mindset blocked accessibility of congruent associations in a semantic priming task (Schul, Mayo, & Burnstein, ) and a repetition priming task (Kleiman, Sher, Elster, & Mayo, ), and applied to a social context, reduced automatic stereotyping (Posten & Mussweiler, ). Furthermore, activating a distrust (compared to a trust) mindset increased a non‐default negative testing strategy in the Wason () rule discovery task (Mayo, Alfasi, & Schwarz, ), attesting to a reduction in the magnitude of confirmation biases.…”

The Effect of Partner Communications of Fraud Likelihood and Skeptical Orientation on Auditors' Professional Skepticism

“…This concern may elevate professional skepticism by way of increased use of nonroutine processing strategies (Schul, Mayo, and Burnstein 2008) and an increased focus on information discounting, rather than supporting, a proposition (Mayo, Alfasi, and Schwartz 2014).…”