When people answer the question “How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?”, they usually respond with “two,” although Moses does not appear in the biblical story of the Ark. We investigated this “Moses illusion” in a multiple-choice format and tested the influence of monetary incentives on the illusion’s strength. Thereby, we addressed the role of a cooperative communication context for the illusion’s emergence, as well as the role of participants’ motivation. In four experiments (total N = 914), we found that the Moses illusion persists in a multiple-choice format. As the multiple-choice format realizes a cooperative context in which the correct answer is always available, we exclude a cooperative context explanation for the illusion. Monetary incentives reduced the strength of the illusion. However, the reduction was numerically and statistically small. We thereby show that the illusion is not due to violations of cooperative communications, and not due to a lack of motivation. The multiple-choice approach will facilitate further research on the Moses illusion and the data provide additional evidence for the Moses illusion’s empirical robustness and constrain its theoretical explanations.

当人们回答“摩西在方舟上各带了多少动物？”这个问题时，他们通常会回答“两个”，尽管摩西并没有出现在约柜的圣经故事中。我们调查了这个“摩西幻觉”一种多项选择形式，并测试了金钱激励对幻觉强度的影响。因此，我们讨论了合作交流环境对幻觉出现的作用，以及参与者动机的作用。在四个实验中（总 N = 914），我们发现摩西错觉以多项选择的形式存在。由于多项选择格式实现了始终可用正确答案的合作上下文，因此我们排除了对错觉的合作上下文解释。货币激励削弱了这种错觉的强度。然而，减少的数字和统计数字很小。因此，我们表明这种错觉不是由于违反合作交流，也不是由于缺乏动力。多项选择方法将促进对摩西错觉的进一步研究，数据为摩西错觉的实证稳健性提供了额外的证据，并限制了其理论解释。