Many subjects fail to recognize that when a 6-sided die with 4 green faces and 2 red faces will be rolled several times, betting on the occurrence of the sequence GRRRRRG is dominated by betting on the sequence RRRRRG, when the subject is given the option to bet on either at the same payoff. This (well, something similar, I didn’t bother to look up the actual sequences used) is cited as evidence that more is going on than subjects misunderstanding the meaning of “and” or “or”. Sure, some subjects just don’t use those words as the experimenters do, and perhaps this accounts for some of why “Linda” shows such a strong effect, but it is a very incomplete explanation of the effect.
Explanations of “Linda” based on linguistic misunderstandings, conversational maxims, etc., generally fail to explain other experiments that produce the same representativeness bias (though perhaps not as strongly) in contexts where there is no chance that the particular misunderstanding alleged could be present.
Many subjects fail to recognize that when a 6-sided die with 4 green faces and 2 red faces will be rolled several times, betting on the occurrence of the sequence GRRRRRG is dominated by betting on the sequence RRRRRG, when the subject is given the option to bet on either at the same payoff. This (well, something similar, I didn’t bother to look up the actual sequences used) is cited as evidence that more is going on than subjects misunderstanding the meaning of “and” or “or”. Sure, some subjects just don’t use those words as the experimenters do, and perhaps this accounts for some of why “Linda” shows such a strong effect, but it is a very incomplete explanation of the effect.
Explanations of “Linda” based on linguistic misunderstandings, conversational maxims, etc., generally fail to explain other experiments that produce the same representativeness bias (though perhaps not as strongly) in contexts where there is no chance that the particular misunderstanding alleged could be present.