The ‘conjunction fallacy’ revisited: how intelligent inferences look like reasoning errors
✍ Scribed by Ralph Hertwig; Gerd Gigerenzer
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1999
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 337 KB
- Volume
- 12
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0894-3257
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Findings in recent research on the conjunction fallacy' have been taken as evidence that our minds are not designed to work by the rules of probability. This conclusion springs from the idea that norms should be content-blind Ð in the present case, the assumption that sound reasoning requires following the conjunction rule of probability theory. But content-blind norms overlook some of the intelligent ways in which humans deal with uncertainty, for instance, when drawing semantic and pragmatic inferences. In a series of studies, we ®rst show that people infer nonmathematical meanings of the polysemous term probability' in the classic Linda conjunction problem. We then demonstrate that one can design contexts in which people infer mathematical meanings of the term and are therefore more likely to conform to the conjunction rule. Finally, we report evidence that the term frequency' narrows the spectrum of possible interpretations of probability' down to its mathematical meanings, and that this fact Ð rather than the presence or absence of `extensional cues' Ð accounts for the low proportion of violations of the conjunction rule when people are asked for frequency judgments. We conclude that a failure to recognize the human capacity for semantic and pragmatic inference can lead rational responses to be misclassi®ed as fallacies.