I did get the problem correct, but in figuring out the answer I got an intuitive sense of why the police officer statement of the problem might work better than

I did get the problem correct, but in figuring out the answer I got an intuitive sense of why the police officer statement of the problem might work better than the number/color statement of the problem. There are two things that I can see which seem way less vague than humans "evolving in a socio-cognitive niche". 1. The number/color statement of the problem doesn't have a cause and effect--the if/then statement of the problem doesn't indicate any actual causality between the number and the color. The only reason humans typically solve these kinds of problems "in the wild" is to understand the causality of a system so they can make intentional interactions with the system that produce effects they want and avoid effects they don't want. The police and underage drinking part has a clear cause/effect: if the person is drinking underage they should be arrested. Having a cause/effect to reason about is much easier to reason about than a correlation between causally disconnected systems. 2. People have prior experience with the underage drinking puzzle: at least in the US, people have probably had to think through some variation of part of this problem before to understand the who and where of drinking legality. Being pattern-matching machines, we solve logical puzzles by matching them to previously-solved logical puzzles.