Background

Peter Cathcart Wason was born on April 22, 1924, in Bath, England, United Kingdom. He was the son of Eugene Monier and Kathleen Wason. He was the grandson of Eugene Wason.

Education

Peter Cathcart Wason was educated at Stowe School. In 1948 he graduated from Oxford University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. In 1953 he obtained a Master of Arts degree in psychology from this university. In 1956 Wason gained a Doctor of Philosophy from University College London.

Career

After serving as a liaison officer for England’s Eighth Independent Armoured Brigade, Peter Cathcart Wason was wounded in Normandy in 1945. He taught English literature at the University of Aberdeen for a year before deciding to study psychology. During most of the 1950s and 1960s, he was a member of the scientific staff at the Medical Research Council in London. In 1968 he joined the faculty at University College, where he remained until his retirement in 1982.

Greatly influenced by philosopher Karl Popper and psychologist Jean Piaget, Wason built on their ideas to show in experiments he developed - most famously, a card-selection experiment that became known as the Wason selection task - that, rather than trying to disprove ideas they have come to believe in, people generally seek to confirm their beliefs when making decisions. This sort of bias, often determined in the real world by people’s philosophical and religious beliefs - can result in logical errors in reasoning.

Wason wrote of his theories in Psychology of Reasoning: Structure and Content (1972), written with P. N. Johnson-Laird, with whom he also edited Thinking and Reasoning (1968). An expert chess player, Wason was also the co-author of The Psychology of Chess (1983).

Achievements

• Peter Wason was one of the most creative and influential British psychologists of the post-war era. He combined imagination with a strong sense of logic, enabling him to investigate errors of thinking. By designing clever test examples he was able to infer much about how our thinking works, and how it goes wrong, from the mistakes that people make. His best-known book is Psychology of Reasoning: Structure and Content, which he wrote with Philip Johnson-Laird.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Psychology of Reasoning: Structure and Content

    (At the core of the Psychology of Reasoning is a vigorous ...)

    1972
  • Psychology of Chess

    (Examines the psychological motivation of chess players an...)

    1983
  • Thinking: Readings in Cognitive Science

    (First published in 1977, this is a volume about the scien...)

    1977
  • Thinking and Reasoning 1968

Views

Peter Cathcart Wason's work was influenced by two academic giants of his period, the philosopher Karl Popper and the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. He challenged the orthodox view of his time that people were by nature basically rational and logical, demonstrating, by the ingenious construction of novel experimental tasks, a range of what are now known as "cognitive biases." In so doing, he laid the foundations for the modern study of thinking and reasoning, which has become a major international research field. In contrast with most fields of cognitive psychology, the study of this topic is not dominated by American researchers. It is part of Wason's legacy that, to this day, British and European researchers take the lead in the study of human reasoning.

Interests

• chess

Connections

In 1951 Peter Cathcart Wason married Marjorie Vera Salberg. They had two children, Armorer and Sarah. In 1984 his wife died. In 1986 he married Joan Williams. In 1995 they divorced.

Father:

Eugene Monier Wason

Mother:

Kathleen Wason

Grandfather:

Eugene Wason

late spouse:

Marjorie Vera Salberg

Daughter:

Armorer Wason

Daughter:

Sarah Wason

colleague:

Philip Johnson-Laird

References

• Contemporary Authors
  2011