When considering the initial probability question regarding Linda, it strikes me that it isn’t really a choice between a single possibility and two conjoined possibilities.
Giving a person an exclusive choice between “bank teller” OR “bank teller and feminist” will make people imply that “bank teller” means “bank teller and not feminist”.
So both choices are conjoined items, it’s just that one of them is hidden.
Given this, people may not be so incorrect after all.
Edit: People should probably stop giving this post points, given Sniffnoy’s linking of a complete destruction of this objection :)
I’ll stick with my upmod because, while Sniffnoy’s link explains that the Linda experiment did take this ambiguity into account and played around it, it was an entirely reasonable point to raise after reading this post, which gives no indication that those two weren’t the only options or that they weren’t placed side-by-side.
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.
When considering the initial probability question regarding Linda, it strikes me that it isn’t really a choice between a single possibility and two conjoined possibilities.
Giving a person an exclusive choice between “bank teller” OR “bank teller and feminist” will make people imply that “bank teller” means “bank teller and not feminist”.
So both choices are conjoined items, it’s just that one of them is hidden.
Given this, people may not be so incorrect after all.
Edit: People should probably stop giving this post points, given Sniffnoy’s linking of a complete destruction of this objection :)
This has already been addressed in Conjunction Controversy.
I’ll stick with my upmod because, while Sniffnoy’s link explains that the Linda experiment did take this ambiguity into account and played around it, it was an entirely reasonable point to raise after reading this post, which gives no indication that those two weren’t the only options or that they weren’t placed side-by-side.
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.