The environmental malleability of base-rate neglect

Turpin, Martin Harry; Meyers, Ethan Andrew; Walker, Alexander; Białek, Michał; Stolz, Jennifer A.; Fugelsang, Jonathan A.

doi:10.3758/s13423-020-01710-1

Cited by 9 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 23 publications

(28 reference statements)

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“…If, however, we studied the effects of foreign language reasoning in a task wherein the strength of the conflict was manipulatable, the Conflict Threshold Model would predict that the FLE disappears when conflict is at its highest because conflict will exceed even FL reasoners' increased threshold for conflict detection. One such family of tasks is base-rate problems (Bar-Hillel, 1980;Białek, 2017;Kahneman & Tversky, 1973;Turpin et al, 2020). In a base-rate task, participants must assess the probability of a person belonging to a particular group (i.e., a lawyer) while ignoring the salient, intuitive, stereotype information they have about the person (i.e., fitting to the stereotypical description of a lawyer).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Thinking in a foreign language distorts allocation of cognitive effort: Evidence from reasoning

et al. 2020

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Bilinguals, in their foreign language, are spared from several decision-making biases.Typically, this "Foreign Language Effect" results in increased accuracy. We examined the Foreign Language Effect in the context of logical reasoning, in which reasoners are required to track the logical status of a syllogism, ignoring its believability. Across three experiments, we found the reverse Foreign Language Effect; foreign language reasoners are less able to evaluate the logical structure of syllogisms, but no less biased by their believability. One path to succeeding in reasoning tasks is always engaging in reflective processing. A more efficient strategy is metacognitively tracking whether belief-based intuitions conflict with logic-based intuitions and only reflecting when such conflict is present. We provide evidence that foreign language reasoners are less accurate because they struggle to detect belief-logic conflict, and in turn fail to engage in reflective processing when necessary to override the incorrect, intuitive response. We propose that foreign language reasoners are less able to detect belief-logic conflict either due to weakened intuitions or due to a more conservative threshold for the detection of conflict between multiple competing intuitions. Data for the experiments can be accessed publicly at https://osf.io/phbuq/

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Thinking in a foreign language distorts allocation of cognitive effort: Evidence from reasoning

et al. 2020

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“…The intuitive assessment of impact or, in other terms, the perceived relevance of information, has been proved to be a key determinant of classical probability reasoning errors, such as the conjunction fallacy (Bhatia, 2017;Tentori & Crupi, 2012;Tentori, Crupi, & Russo, 2013) and the base-rate neglect (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973;Bar-Hillel, 1980;Turpin et al, 2020). Similarly, the spontaneous and implicit appreciation of evidential impact has been shown to play a role, often under other names, in a variety of linguistic and psycholinguistic phenomena that have inherent probabilistic components, including representation of word meanings (Bullinaria & Levy, 2007), semantic priming (Nadalini, Marelli, Bottini, & Crepaldi, 2018), and estimation of the word co-occurrence likelihood (Paperno, Marelli, Tentori, & Baroni, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Effect of Evidential Impact on Perceptual Probabilistic Judgments

et al. 2021

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In a series of three behavioral experiments, we found a systematic distortion of probability judgments concerning elementary visual stimuli. Participants were briefly shown a set of figures that had two features (e.g., a geometric shape and a color) with two possible values each (e.g., triangle or circle and black or white). A figure was then drawn, and participants were informed about the value of one of its features (e.g., that the figure was a “circle”) and had to predict the value of the other feature (e.g., whether the figure was “black” or “white”). We repeated this procedure for various sets of figures and, by varying the statistical association between features in the sets, we manipulated the probability of a feature given the evidence of another (e.g., the posterior probability of hypothesis “black” given the evidence “circle”) as well as the support provided by a feature to another (e.g., the impact, or confirmation, of evidence “circle” on the hypothesis “black”). Results indicated that participants’ judgments were deeply affected by impact, although they only should have depended on the probability distributions over the features, and that the dissociation between evidential impact and posterior probability increased the number of errors. The implications of these findings for lower and higher level cognitive models are discussed.

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“…Answering these questions should help determine whether base rates matter in the real world and by extension provide support for either models that claim experts neglect base rates or models that claim experts use base rates (Turpin et al, 2020). Additionally, this research provides an opportunity to go beyond that basic dichotomy and outline the parameters of when and to what extent base rates are used.…”

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“…Koehler (1996) argued that to overcome the inconsistencies, "patterns of base-rate usage must be examined in more realistic contexts to determine when, if ever, people make consequential errors" (p. 14). We argue here that to test this we need to go beyond lab experiments to solve the problems raised repeatedly by researchers in this field (Turpin et al, 2020). Therefore, the aim of the current study was to test whether base rates are used in real-world sequential decisions.…”

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Experts use base rates in real-world sequential decisions

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Raab

2021

Psychon Bull Rev

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Human behavior is often assumed to be irrational, full of errors, and affected by cognitive biases. One of these biases is base-rate neglect, which happens when the base rates of a specific category are not considered when making decisions. We argue here that while naïve subjects demonstrate base-rate neglect in laboratory conditions, experts tested in the real world do use base rates. Our explanation is that lab studies use single questions, whereas, in the real world, most decisions are sequential in nature, leading to a more realistic test of base-rate use. One decision that lends itself to testing base-rate use in real life occurs in beach volleyball—specifically, deciding to whom to serve to win the game. Analyzing the sequential choices in expert athletes in more than 1,300 games revealed that they were sensitive to base rates and adapted their decision strategies to the performance of the opponent. Our data describes a threshold at which players change their strategy and use base rates. We conclude that the debate over whether decision makers use base rates should be shifted to real-world tests, and the focus should be on when and how base rates are used.

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The environmental malleability of base-rate neglect

Cited by 9 publications

References 23 publications

Thinking in a foreign language distorts allocation of cognitive effort: Evidence from reasoning

Thinking in a foreign language distorts allocation of cognitive effort: Evidence from reasoning

The Effect of Evidential Impact on Perceptual Probabilistic Judgments

Experts use base rates in real-world sequential decisions

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