My professor has told me a fun way of looking at these types of puzzles. These types of puzzles say that there must be some type of logical answer and thus we look at the most likely to be it. But this being the most likely shouldn't eliminate the others.
We sometimes fail to see a multitude of other possibilities by only looking at one.
So answer examples could be
- 60, as mentioned above double the addition
- 48 , add 12 to the previous answer
- Anything above 36, the outcome must be greater than the previous. Although quite unlikely it's still a valid answer as it does not invalidate the other 3 truths.
His example was slightly different and made more sense there but I still wanted to share it. We are looking for patterns and the top one appears to be the most logical. Though it's possible that the missing number is even 120 considering the rule can be quite vague and quite literally anything.