Maybe a misunderstanding about the word is relevant, but it clearly isn’t entirely responsible for the effect.
In the study you quoted, a bit less than half of the answers were wrong, in sharp contrast to the Linda example, where 90% of the answers were wrong. It implies that at least 40% of the failures were a result of misunderstanding. This only leaves 60% for fallacies. Of that 60%, some people have other misunderstandings and other errors of reasoning, and some people are plain stupid (10% are the dumbest people out of 10, i.e. have an IQ of 80 or less), leaving easily less than 50% for the actual conjunction fallacy.
It seems implausible that providing this extra information will change the subject’s judgment about what the experimenter means by “probable”.
Why so? If the word “probable” is fairly ill defined (as well as the whole concept of probability), then it will or will not acquire specific meaning depending on the context.
The description given of Linda in the problem statement (outspoken philosophy major, social justice activist) is much more representative of feminist bank tellers than it is of bank tellers.
Then the representativeness works in the opposite direction from what’s commonly assumed of the dice example.
Speaking of which, “is” is sometimes used to describe traits for identification purposes, e.g. “in general, an alligator is shorter and less aggressive than a crocodile” is more correct than “in general, an alligator is shorter than a crocodile”. If you were to compile traits for finding Linda, you’d pick the most descriptive answer. People know they need to do something with what they are told, they don’t necessarily understand correctly what they need to do.
In the study you quoted, a bit less than half of the answers were wrong, in sharp contrast to the Linda example, where 90% of the answers were wrong. It implies that at least 40% of the failures were a result of misunderstanding. This only leaves 60% for fallacies. Of that 60%, some people have other misunderstandings and other errors of reasoning, and some people are plain stupid (10% are the dumbest people out of 10, i.e. have an IQ of 80 or less), leaving easily less than 50% for the actual conjunction fallacy.
Why so? If the word “probable” is fairly ill defined (as well as the whole concept of probability), then it will or will not acquire specific meaning depending on the context.
Then the representativeness works in the opposite direction from what’s commonly assumed of the dice example.
Speaking of which, “is” is sometimes used to describe traits for identification purposes, e.g. “in general, an alligator is shorter and less aggressive than a crocodile” is more correct than “in general, an alligator is shorter than a crocodile”. If you were to compile traits for finding Linda, you’d pick the most descriptive answer. People know they need to do something with what they are told, they don’t necessarily understand correctly what they need to do.