Peter Cathcart Wason

Wason was born in Bath Somerset on 22 April 1924, and died at seventy-nine in Wallingford, Oxfordshire on 17 April 2003. Peter Wason was the grandson to Eugene Wason,[2] and the son to Eugene Monier and Kathleen (Woodhouse) Wason.[3] Wason married Marjorie Vera Salberg in 1951, and the couple had two children, Armorer and Sarah.[3]

Peter Wason endured his schooling, which was marked by consistent failure.[2] With the beginning of World War II, Wason completed officer training in Sandhurst, and continued on to serve as a liaison officer for England's Eight Independent Armoured Brigade.[3] In the Year 1945 Wason returned home, having been released from his duties of being an officer due to extreme injuries. Wason then pursued more academic ventures by studying English at Oxford in 1948,[3] and continued on to become a lecturer at the Aberdeen college. After the realization that he did not really prefer English, and actually found it quite boring, Wason attended Oxford University to obtain a master's degree in psychology in 1953, and then a doctorate in 1956 from University College London.[3] He remained teaching at University College London until his retirement in the early 1980s.[2]

Much of Peter Wason’s first areas of experimentation was not in the field of psychology of reasoning, but instead, language and psycholinguistics. Wason and Jones performed an experiment in which subjects were asked to evaluate numerical statements, such as “7 is even” and “9 is not odd”, and state whether the statement is true or false. The results revealed that affirmative assertions were evaluated faster as true than as false, but evaluation of negative assertions occurred faster as false than true.[4] From these results, Wason came to the conclusion that negatives are used in daily lives and discourse to correct common misconceptions. An example of this usage would be “The chair is not here”. Wason continued to explore and experiment in the field of psycholinguistics. Alongside Susan Carey [5] at the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies, Wason found that context affects comprehension of an utterance, measured in time taken to respond. Participants were likely to respond more quickly to the statement “Circle number 4 is not blue” in a context in which all of the other circles were red.[6] Wason came to the conclusion context affects comprehension.

Before the creation of psychology of reasoning, it was a commonly held belief that humans reasoned by logical analysis. Wason argued against this logicism, saying that humans are unable to reason, and quite frequently fall prey to biases. Wason thought many of the things in his life were inconsistent and therefore unreasonable.[7] When he designed his experiments, Wason's goal was to examine the illogical nature of humans. Wason also wanted to look further into the confirmation bias, the tendency to strive toward proving one’s hypothesis instead of disproving it.

Peter Wason took a rather unconventional approach to his studies. When running experiments, he took a more active approach. Although he had some lab aides, he insisted on being present when experiments were run, so he could actively watch the subjects’ behavior throughout the process. It is also said that Wason infused a clinical psychology atmosphere into his study by asking his subjects how they felt about the experiment itself, as well as the results delivered. These evaluations were recorded and placed in his papers, giving them a more personal and unique feel than many other academic papers of the time. Wason’s goal was to discover new psychological phenomena and new aspects of human behavior, and not only to test his own hypotheses.

Wason wrote the following books:

• Thinking and Reasoning, (co-edited with P N Johnson-Laird, 1968)
• Psychology of Reasoning: Structure and Content, (with P N Johnson-Laird, 1972)
• Thinking: Readings in Cognitive Science, (co-edited with P N Johnson-Laird, 1977)
• The Psychology of Chess, (with William Hartston, 1983).