I think this might possibly be explained if they looked at it in reverse. Not “how likely is it that somebody with this description would be A-F”, but “how likely is it that somebody who’s A-F would fit this description”.
When I answered it I started out by guessing how many doctors there were relative to accountants—I thought fewer—and how many architects there were relative to doctors—much fewer. If there just aren’t many architects out there than it would take a whole lot of selection for somebody to be more likely to be one.
But if you look at it the other way around then the number of architects is irrelevant. If you ask how likely is it an architect would fit that description, you don’t care how many architects there are.
So it might seem unlikely that a jazz hobbyist would be unimaginative and lifeless. But more likely if he’s also an accountant.
I think this is a key point—given a list of choices, people compare each one to the original statement and say “how well does this fit?” I certainly started that way before an instinct about multiple conditions kicked in. Given that, its not that people are incorrectly finding the chance that A-F are true given the description, but that they are correctly finding the chance that the description is true, given one of A-F.
I think the other circumstances might display tweaked version of the same forces, also. For example, answering the suspension of relations question not as P(X^Y) vs P(Y), but perceiving it as P(Y), given X.
But if the question “What is P(X), given Y?” is stated clearly, and then the reader interprets it as “What is P(Y), given X”, then that’s still an error on their part in the form of poor reading comprehension.
Which still highlights a possible flaw in the experiment.
I think this might possibly be explained if they looked at it in reverse. Not “how likely is it that somebody with this description would be A-F”, but “how likely is it that somebody who’s A-F would fit this description”.
When I answered it I started out by guessing how many doctors there were relative to accountants—I thought fewer—and how many architects there were relative to doctors—much fewer. If there just aren’t many architects out there than it would take a whole lot of selection for somebody to be more likely to be one.
But if you look at it the other way around then the number of architects is irrelevant. If you ask how likely is it an architect would fit that description, you don’t care how many architects there are.
So it might seem unlikely that a jazz hobbyist would be unimaginative and lifeless. But more likely if he’s also an accountant.
I think this is a key point—given a list of choices, people compare each one to the original statement and say “how well does this fit?” I certainly started that way before an instinct about multiple conditions kicked in. Given that, its not that people are incorrectly finding the chance that A-F are true given the description, but that they are correctly finding the chance that the description is true, given one of A-F.
I think the other circumstances might display tweaked version of the same forces, also. For example, answering the suspension of relations question not as P(X^Y) vs P(Y), but perceiving it as P(Y), given X.
But if the question “What is P(X), given Y?” is stated clearly, and then the reader interprets it as “What is P(Y), given X”, then that’s still an error on their part in the form of poor reading comprehension.
Which still highlights a possible flaw in the experiment.