Agreed, I’ve always thought that the heuristics and biases research is less clear cut than is usually presented due to ambiguity in the question and experimental setup. People naturally read more into questions than is strictly implied because that is the normal way we deal with language. They may make not unreasonable assumptions that would normally be valid and are only ruled out by the artificial and unnatural constraints of the experiment.
For example, it has long struck me that the obvious explanation for hyperbolic discounting is people making quite reasonable assumptions about the probability of collecting the promised rewards and thus it is not good evidence for chronic time inconsistency in preferences. In looking up the Wikipedia reference for hyperbolic discounting I see that I am unsurprisingly not the first to notice this.
Agreed, I’ve always thought that the heuristics and biases research is less clear cut than is usually presented due to ambiguity in the question and experimental setup. People naturally read more into questions than is strictly implied because that is the normal way we deal with language. They may make not unreasonable assumptions that would normally be valid and are only ruled out by the artificial and unnatural constraints of the experiment.
For example, it has long struck me that the obvious explanation for hyperbolic discounting is people making quite reasonable assumptions about the probability of collecting the promised rewards and thus it is not good evidence for chronic time inconsistency in preferences. In looking up the Wikipedia reference for hyperbolic discounting I see that I am unsurprisingly not the first to notice this.