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....

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of personality and social psychology 1991-08, Vol.61 (2), p.181-194
Main Authors: Gavanski, Igor, Roskos-Ewoldsen, David R
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biological and medical sciences
Cognition & reasoning
Cognition. Intelligence
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Human
Humans
Judgment
Probability
Probability Judgment
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Reasoning. Problem solving
Social Perception
Social research
Speech
Surveys and Questionnaires
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Summary: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.
ISSN:0022-3514
1939-1315
DOI:10.1037/0022-3514.61.2.181