ABSTRACT
My interests in conditionals, cognitive biases, rationality and dual processes – in short, the themes which have dominated my entire research career – all have their origins in my earliest work in the 1970s. It begins with my PhD work (1969–1972) under the inspirational supervision of Peter Wason and is a tale of much serendipity. I tried to introduce some novelty into the study of conditional reasoning and in the process discovered some phenomena that were in no way anticipated and led to all manner of unexpected consequences. These were developed initially using the Wason selection task (Wason, 1966) the famous problem which consumed the interest of my supervisor during the time of my PhD studies. At the time, both Wason and Johnson-Laird were intensively studying the Wason selection task and preparing their influential book on the psychology of reasoning (Wason and Johnson-Laird, 1972).
