If you are like most people, some of these problems seemed easy while others see

Question

If you are like most people, some of these problems seemed easy while others seemed hard. The problems come in two types: social problems and descriptive problems. The social problems take the form, “if you want some benefit, you must
pay some cost.” For example, get good grades if you want to stay on the team. The descriptive problems take the form “if something is true, then something else true.” Most people find the social problems much easier.

However, the two problems are logically identical.

In each case you are given the statement



and in both problems the four cards state

P, Q, not P, not Q

Then you are asked which cards you need to turn over to determine whether the statement is true for that card. The laws of logic say that the statement If P, then Q can only be falsified by observing P and not Q. Thus the only two cards that need to be turned over are P, to see if the other side is not Q, and not Q, to see if the other side is P. Most people can easily see this reasoning is correct in the case of the social problems, but not in the case of the descriptive problems.

The psychologists who first discovered this effect believed that people were better at solving familiar problems than unfamiliar problems. However, additional experiments show that familiarity does not predict which problems people will find easy to solve.

Recently, Cosmides and Tooby have provided a different explanation. They contend that people are good at solving problems involving reciprocal altruism and other forms of social exchange, and this skill was crucial for success in the small groups that have characterized human societies for most of our history. Food sharing, which is an essential part of hunter-gatherer ecology, is a form of reciprocal altruism. The big problem with reciprocal altruism is that it is costly to interact with individuals who do not reciprocate. Thus, human cognition should be tuned to look for cheaters in social exchanges. Previous questions that you were asked to
solve above had the form ``If you take the benefit, then you pay the cost.” Tooby and Cosmides argue that people are tuned to attend to situations in which people take the benefit without paying the cost. Thus, they look for people who are
drinking beer even though they are under 21.

What sorts of problems did you find most difficult, and why?

Explanation / Answer

Explanation:

1. Public goods are characterized by non- excludability. Once they exist, no one can be excluded from benefiting from them.

2. Non-rivalry: The fact that i enjoy the good does not impinge on other people enjoying the same good at the same time. If a good is a public good in this technical sense , free riding may lead to its non-production.

3. If goods are 'public' in the sense, citizens will not gain potential benefits unless they find an alternative to the ordinary combination of private entrepreneurship and a competitive market. Examples are streelighting, lighthouses and security are technically public goods.

4. A first possibilty is that the government may provide the good. In this case taxpayers contribute, independently of whether or not they benefit from the good produced.

5. If the decision is to provide the good is taken demicratically, we may assume that its total value exceeds the total cost. Moreover, the government , unlike a monopolist, does not capture this surplus.

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