Abstract

The aim of this study is to demonstrate that deontic rules which have only a single possible interpretation yield a facilitating effect on Wason selection task. In the Experiment 1 we have recognized some conditionals that are only associated to a single rule ("social contract", or "permission rule", or "prudential rule") and others that share various possible interpretations (social contract + permission; social contract + permission + precautionary, and so on). In the Experiment 2 the above two kinds of conditionals are used as rules which the truth status was to be tested in the Wason selection task. The results supported that conditional tasks involving "single coding" rules elicit a higher percentage of correct responses than others involving "multiple coding" rules.