Testing boundary conditions for the conjunction fallacy: Effects of response mode, conceptual focus, and problem type

Wedell, Douglas H.; Moro, Rodrigo

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2007.08.003

Cited by 66 publications

(118 citation statements)

References 22 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

107

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The current Experiment 1 and the observation that about a quarter of people arrived at a union reading (see the Venn diagram task) suggest that the large difference in violations of the conjunction rule between Hertwig's (1995) two frequency representations may partly be due to the ambiguity of the and connective and partly be owed to the difference in response mode (ranking versus estimation). In fact, Sloman et al (2003) found -using a who connective -that 69.9% participants violated the conjunction rule in a frequency ranking, relative to 33.3% in a frequency estimation version of the Linda task (for similar findings see also Wedell & Moro, 2008).…”

Section: (50)mentioning

confidence: 73%

The conjunction fallacy and the many meanings of and

2008

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

a b s t r a c tAccording to the conjunction rule, the probability of A and B cannot exceed the probability of either single event. This rule reads and in terms of the logical operator^, interpreting A and B as an intersection of two events. As linguists have long argued, in natural language ''and" can convey a wide range of relationships between conjuncts such as temporal order (''I went to the store and bought some whisky"), causal relationships (''Smile and the world smiles with you"), and can indicate a collection of sets rather than their intersection (as in ''He invited friends and colleagues to the party"). When ''and" is used in word problems researching the conjunction fallacy, the conjunction rule, which assumes the logical operator^, therefore cannot be mechanically invoked as a norm. Across several studies, we used different methods of probing people's understanding of and-conjunctions, and found evidence that many of those respondents who violated the conjunction rule in their probability or frequency judgments inferred a meaning of and that differs from the logical operator^. We argue that these findings have implications for whether judgments involving ambiguous and-conjunctions that violate the conjunction rule should be considered manifestations of fallacious reasoning or of reasonable pragmatic and semantic inferences.Ó 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.. . .it is a mistake to analyze natural language words like and as being identical to entities of the man-made logical terminology which so clearly derives from natural language (rather than the other way around) and so clearly has needs and purposes distinct from those of natural language (Sweetser, 1990, p. 92).One of the most frequent words in the English language is and. In Leech, Rayson, and Wilson's (2001) analysis of word frequencies in a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language (the British National Corpus) the unremarkable three-letter word ''and" is the third most frequent word. Its commonness and plainness, however, do not mean that the most general connective in the English language lacks the ability to convey a wide range of relationships between the states of affairs described by the conjuncts. In fact, one reason for linguists' enduring fascination with and is that among all coordinating conjunctions (e.g., or, but, nor) it has the least semantic and syntactic limits, the least specific meaning, and the highest context dependency (Lang, 1991).Take, for instance, the use of and in (1): (1) Her husband is in hospital and she is seeing other men.As Kitis (2000) pointed out, the and in (1) does much more than conjoin the two clauses. Rather, it functions as an ''emotional device" that communicates the speaker's emotional attitude, surprise, or even outrage.The notion of and's context dependency stands in stark contrast with the highly constrained meaning of the logical and operator (^). The logical^represents the Boolean intersection of two sets. For illustration, if set A contains all even numbers (mu...

show abstract

Section: (50)mentioning

confidence: 73%

The conjunction fallacy and the many meanings of and

2008

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…As a matter of fact, most of the subsequent complaints had already been addressed by Tversky and Kahneman (1983). In any event, further refinement of experimental techniques and thorough theoretical scrutiny have clearly shown that the phenomenon is real and in need of explanation (for an extensive review, see Moro, 2009; also see Crupi, Fitelson, & Tentori, 2008;Sides, Osherson, Bonini, & Viale, 2002;Sloman, Over, Slovak, & Stibel, 2003;Stolarz-Fantino, Fantino, Zizzo, & Wen, 2003;Tentori & Crupi, 2012b;Wedell & Moro, 2008). In consideration of the remarkable amount of discussion and research effort that it has prompted in the last 30 years, what is surprising is the lack of a generally accepted explanation of the conjunction fallacy, as pointed out by several observers (e.g., Fisk, 2004;Jarvstad & Hahn, 2011;Nilsson, Winman, Juslin, & Hansson, 2009).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A good deal of the conjunction fallacy literature has focused on whether and how the phenomenon is modulated by several variants of the experimental task (see, e.g., Wedell & Moro, 2008). In particular, the employment of frequency formats and estimation procedures has been reported to mitigate the conjunction fallacy in 10 The relation of inductive confirmation is symmetrical, so that e confirms h if and only if h confirms e. However, the measurement of confirmation is not commutative in the sense that c(h 2 , h 1 ͉e) does not necessarily equal c(h 1 , h 2 ͉e) (see Crupi et al, 2007, andEells &Fitelson, 2002).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

On the determinants of the conjunction fallacy: Probability versus inductive confirmation.

Tentori¹,

Crupi²,

Russo³

2013

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

132

177

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Major recent interpretations of the conjunction fallacy postulate that people assess the probability of a conjunction according to (non-normative) averaging rules as applied to the constituents' probabilities or represent the conjunction fallacy as an effect of random error in the judgment process. In the present contribution, we contrast such accounts with a different reading of the phenomenon based on the notion of inductive confirmation as defined by contemporary Bayesian theorists. Averaging rule hypotheses along with the random error model and many other existing proposals are shown to all imply that conjunction fallacy rates would rise as the perceived probability of the added conjunct does. By contrast, our account predicts that the conjunction fallacy depends on the added conjunct being perceived as inductively confirmed. Four studies are reported in which the judged probability versus confirmation of the added conjunct have been systematically manipulated and dissociated. The results consistently favor a confirmation-theoretic account of the conjunction fallacy against competing views. Our proposal is also discussed in connection with related issues in the study of human inductive reasoning.

show abstract

“…Participants made the same proportion of conjunction fallacies when answering the tasks formulated as frequencies as those given in the probability format. Wedell and Moro (2008) also failed to find a significant reduction in the conjunction bias due to the frequency effect across eight different tasks presented to the participants in two experiments. However, they did point out that although ''shifting the focus from probabilities to frequencies did not significantly reduce conjunction errors in either Experiment 1 or 2, it trended in that direction'' (Wedell & Moro, 2008, p. 125).…”

Section: Influence Of the Task Format On Cognitive Biasesmentioning

confidence: 99%