Human brains excel at detecting cheaters

[nsane.forums]

Nobody likes a cheater. And now there is evidence that our brains may have a very specific adaptation to identify cheating in social situations.

Humans’ propensity to exchange goods and services is ubiquitous across all cultures, but these social exchanges only function well when the incidence of cheaters is low; therefore, the ability to detect cheaters in this type of exchange is probably under strong selection. An article in PNAS last week suggests that humans' ability to detect violations of social contracts is incredibly accurate, but it's a skill that cannot necessarily be generalized to other logical reasoning situations.

View: Original Article

[shought]

From the original article:

When asked to identify the violation of a simple conditional reasoning statement such as "If someone is a biologist, then they must like camping," less than 30 percent of respondents can correctly state what would violate the statement. However, when the statement describes a social contract such as the exchange of shoes for $50, the percentage of people that can identify the violation jumps to between 65 and 80 percent.

Despite the fact that the statements are logically identical, people can identify the violation much more readily when it's stated in terms of cheating in a social exchange.

Even when the simple conditional statement is extremely familiar to the subjects ("If I eat cereal, then I also drink orange juice"), and the social exchange statement is completely unfamiliar ("If you get a tattoo on your face, then I’ll give you cassava root"), people are still better able to identify the violation of the social contract statement.

The statements aren't logically identical. One is 'If A does X then B does Y' and the other is 'If A does X then A does Y'. (I don't know whether they used more statements, I guess so, but still...)