Your objection seems to boil down to, “Experimental settings are not identical to actual settings, therefore, everything derived from them is useless.”
It seems pretty unlikely that people will miscalculate probability in an experiment with money on the line, but then always calculate it with perfect accuracy when they are not specifically in an experimental setting.
In short how is the experimental setting so different that we should completely ignore experimental results? If you have a detailed argument for that, then you’d actually be making a point.
I think, in general, they don’t calculate it at all.
They don’t do it in normal life, and they don’t do it in most of the studies either.
In short how is the experimental setting so different that we should completely ignore experimental results?
It’s different in that it’s specifically designed to elicit this mistake. It’s designed to trick people. How do I know this? Well apart from the various arguments I’ve given, they said so in their paper.
So, your position is that it is completely unrealistic to try to trick people, because that never happens in real life? Really? Or is it a moral condemnation of the researchers. They’re bad people, so we shouldn’t acknowledge their results?
People try to trick each other all the time. People try to trick themselves all the time. People routinely make informal estimates of what’s likely to happen. These experiments all show that under certain circumstances, people will systematically be wrong. Not one thing you’ve said goes to counter this. Your entire argument appears predicated on the confusion of “all” with “some.”
If you succeed at tricking people, you can get them to make mistakes.
What those mistakes are is an interesting issue. There is no argument the mistakes actually have anything to do with the conjunction fallacy. They were simply designed to look like they do.
If you succeed at tricking people, you can get them to make mistakes.
This pretty much is the conjunction fallacy. Facts presented in certain ways will cause people to systematically make mistakes. If people did not have a bias in this respect, these tricks would not work. It is going to be hard to get people to think, “Billy won the science fair and is captain of the football team” is more likely than each statement separately, because the representativeness heuristic is not implicated.
There is no argument the mistakes actually have anything to do with the conjunction fallacy.
I have no idea what this means, unless it’s saying, “I’m right and that’s all there is to say.” This is hardly a useful claim. There appears to be rather overwhelming argument on the part of most of the commenters on this forum and the vast majority of psychologists that there is not only such an argument, but that it is compelling.
Your objection seems to boil down to, “Experimental settings are not identical to actual settings, therefore, everything derived from them is useless.”
It seems pretty unlikely that people will miscalculate probability in an experiment with money on the line, but then always calculate it with perfect accuracy when they are not specifically in an experimental setting.
In short how is the experimental setting so different that we should completely ignore experimental results? If you have a detailed argument for that, then you’d actually be making a point.
I think, in general, they don’t calculate it at all.
They don’t do it in normal life, and they don’t do it in most of the studies either.
It’s different in that it’s specifically designed to elicit this mistake. It’s designed to trick people. How do I know this? Well apart from the various arguments I’ve given, they said so in their paper.
So, your position is that it is completely unrealistic to try to trick people, because that never happens in real life? Really? Or is it a moral condemnation of the researchers. They’re bad people, so we shouldn’t acknowledge their results?
People try to trick each other all the time. People try to trick themselves all the time. People routinely make informal estimates of what’s likely to happen. These experiments all show that under certain circumstances, people will systematically be wrong. Not one thing you’ve said goes to counter this. Your entire argument appears predicated on the confusion of “all” with “some.”
If you succeed at tricking people, you can get them to make mistakes.
What those mistakes are is an interesting issue. There is no argument the mistakes actually have anything to do with the conjunction fallacy. They were simply designed to look like they do.
This pretty much is the conjunction fallacy. Facts presented in certain ways will cause people to systematically make mistakes. If people did not have a bias in this respect, these tricks would not work. It is going to be hard to get people to think, “Billy won the science fair and is captain of the football team” is more likely than each statement separately, because the representativeness heuristic is not implicated.
I have no idea what this means, unless it’s saying, “I’m right and that’s all there is to say.” This is hardly a useful claim. There appears to be rather overwhelming argument on the part of most of the commenters on this forum and the vast majority of psychologists that there is not only such an argument, but that it is compelling.