Representativeness and conjoint probability.
People commonly violate a basic rule of probability, judging a conjunction of events to be more probable than at least 1 of its component events. Many manifestations of this conjunction fallacy have been ascribed to people's reliance on the representativeness heuristic for judging probability. Some conjunction fallacies, however, have been ascribed to the incorrect rules people use to combine probabilities. In 2 experiments, representativeness was pitted against probability combination to determine the contributions of each to the fallacy. Even for exemplar representativeness problems, the fallacy stemmed primarily from the application of incorrect combination rules. Representativeness seemed to be involved only insofar as it influenced the probabilities of a conjunction's component events. Implications of these findings are discussed for the representativeness account of judgmental errors and the relation between similarity and probability.
Department of Psychology, Indiana University, Bloomington 47405.
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Gavanski
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Roskos-Ewoldsen
D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D011336:Probability; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires