People find conjunctive and disjunctive rules far harder than single-element rules.

Evidence

In the same way, when people search for the solution to puzzles in experimental settings, they focus on rules with only one element. They are slow to explore the possibility that the required answer is conjunctive (i.e., the presence of two or more elements) and even slower to think of possibilities that are disjunctive (i.e., one element present but another absent). This was a clear result of Bruner, Goodnow, and Austin’s A Study of Thinking in which subjects were asked to reconstruct the rule by which an item was determined to belong to a category established by the experimenter. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2559

Categorization

• SHARE: Worth sending to a cognitive-science friend infatuated with Bruner’s early work.
• XREF: connects to: Rules aimed at everyone are the hardest to communicate — Lawrence M. Friedman and Grant M. Hayden, American Law: An Introduction, 1056