Peter Cathcart Wason (22 April 1924 - 17 April 2003) was a cognitive psychologist, who worked on the psychology of reason. He made great progress in explaining why people make certain consistent mistakes in logical reasoning. He designed logical problems and tests to demonstrate these processes, for example the Wason selection task, the THOG problem and the 2-4-6 problem.

Wason was an International Master in correspondence chess.

He was born in Bath, Somerset and died in Wallingford, Oxfordshire.

See alsoEdit

PublicationsEdit

BooksEdit

• Wason, P.C. and Johnson-Laird, P.N. (1968)(eds) Thinking and Reasoning
• Wason, P.C. and Johnson-Laird, P.N. (1972)(eds) Thinking: Readings in Cognitive Science
• Wason, P.C. and Johnson-Laird, P.N. (1972) Psychology of Reasoning: Structure and Content, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
• The Psychology of Chess (with William Hartston, 1983).

Book ChaptersEdit

PapersEdit

• Wason, P.C. (1966) Reasoning. In: B. Foss (ed.) New Horizons in Psychology, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
• Wason, P.C. (1968) Reasoning about a rule, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 20: 273-81.
• Wason, P.C. and Johnson-Laird, P.N. (1970) A conflict between selecting and evaluating information in an inferential task, British Journal of Psychology 6 L 509-15.
• Wason, P. and Shapiro, D. (1971) Natural and contrived experience in a reasoning problem, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 23: 63-71.

External linksEdit

Further readingEdit

• includeonly>"Peter Wason", The Telegraph url=http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2003%2F04%2F22%2Fdb2202.xml, Telegraph Group Limited, 22 April 2003. Retrieved on 22 April, 2006.
• includeonly>Johnson-Laird, Philip. "Peter Wason", The Education Guardian, Guardian Newspapers Limited, 25 April, 2003.