No amount of cajoling, explanation, or examples could get remote villagers to use reasoning based on any concept that was not a concrete part of their daily lives. The farmers and students who had begun to join the modern world were able to practice a kind of thinking called “eduction,” to work out guiding principles when given facts or materials, even in the absence of instructions, and even when they had never seen the material before. This, it turns out, is precisely what Raven’s Progressive Matrices tests.
