(Does anyone actually know the base rate in this case?)
Guess: Engineering is at least twice as likely, but at large state schools with significant engineering programs it’s more like 5 or 10 times as likely.
Looking it up at my school: about 4 times as many mechanical engineers as psychology graduate students, and that’s not counting electrical, chemical, petroleum, or various other forms of engineering (which are smaller than mechanical and don’t advertise their numbers as prominently). (I go to a large state school with a significant engineering program.)
Looking it up nationally: it’s easiest to track PhDs granted, and we see in 2010 there were 7,552 engineering PhDs granted and 3,421 psychology PhDs granted. This doesn’t quite track the number of graduate students, since I suspect the proportion of master’s degrees is higher in engineering (and the average PhD duration might be different).
It’s also worth pointing out that if you don’t know the base rates, you can often look them up in real-world situations, but remembering that you need to look them up is generally the hard part.
Guess: Engineering is at least twice as likely, but at large state schools with significant engineering programs it’s more like 5 or 10 times as likely.
Looking it up at my school: about 4 times as many mechanical engineers as psychology graduate students, and that’s not counting electrical, chemical, petroleum, or various other forms of engineering (which are smaller than mechanical and don’t advertise their numbers as prominently). (I go to a large state school with a significant engineering program.)
Looking it up nationally: it’s easiest to track PhDs granted, and we see in 2010 there were 7,552 engineering PhDs granted and 3,421 psychology PhDs granted. This doesn’t quite track the number of graduate students, since I suspect the proportion of master’s degrees is higher in engineering (and the average PhD duration might be different).
It’s also worth pointing out that if you don’t know the base rates, you can often look them up in real-world situations, but remembering that you need to look them up is generally the hard part.
Now that I think about it, I think it was education that was in the classic example, not psychology.