I think this is a key point—given a list of choices, people compare each one to the original statement and say “how well does this fit?” I certainly started that way before an instinct about multiple conditions kicked in. Given that, its not that people are incorrectly finding the chance that A-F are true given the description, but that they are correctly finding the chance that the description is true, given one of A-F.
I think the other circumstances might display tweaked version of the same forces, also. For example, answering the suspension of relations question not as P(X^Y) vs P(Y), but perceiving it as P(Y), given X.
But if the question “What is P(X), given Y?” is stated clearly, and then the reader interprets it as “What is P(Y), given X”, then that’s still an error on their part in the form of poor reading comprehension.
Which still highlights a possible flaw in the experiment.
I think this is a key point—given a list of choices, people compare each one to the original statement and say “how well does this fit?” I certainly started that way before an instinct about multiple conditions kicked in. Given that, its not that people are incorrectly finding the chance that A-F are true given the description, but that they are correctly finding the chance that the description is true, given one of A-F.
I think the other circumstances might display tweaked version of the same forces, also. For example, answering the suspension of relations question not as P(X^Y) vs P(Y), but perceiving it as P(Y), given X.
But if the question “What is P(X), given Y?” is stated clearly, and then the reader interprets it as “What is P(Y), given X”, then that’s still an error on their part in the form of poor reading comprehension.
Which still highlights a possible flaw in the experiment.