Abstract

A series of recent studies showed that facilitation on Wason Selection Task can be produced by perceived utilities. The present work was aimed at testing whether such similar factor is also involved in human reasoning performance in the context of responsibility. We supposed that the mind of the subject assuming responsibility is characterised by normative goals. These goals prescribe actions and results to reach, also considering the different social roles. In our experiment the responses of different groups of subjects to the selection task were compared in three different conditions involving different contexts. In condition 1 we presented two different conditional rules in a context of responsibility. In conditions 2 and 3 the same rules were presented in a context of no responsibility. The results show that the subjects' strategies in searching for possible violators depend on the type of condition being tested (responsibility vs. no responsibility). In particular, we found that only in the context of responsibility, the performances elicited by conditional rules are characterised by a falsification strategy.