The psychology of dynamic probability judgment: order effect, normative theories, and experimental methodology

Abstract

Dynamic probability judgment, Bayesian coherence, Probability revising, Probability updating, Linguistic pragmatics, Order effect, Redundancy effect,

Updating: A psychologically basic situation of probability revision

“…Thus, psychologists working in the field of probability revision have never considered the conceptual differences between the situations of revision that have been defined in AI, philosophy and cognitive economics. The quasi-totality of the experimental paradigms addresses focusing (for a review, see Baratgin & Politzer, 2007), whereas updating has not been explicitly considered.…”

“…In Experiment 1 (which corresponds to an isomorphic version of the MHP) the experimenter delivers an uninformative message like, for example, an already known message, and so we predict that a sizeable number of participants will nevertheless modify their initial degrees of belief. This experiment is a close replication of an experiment carried out in Baratgin (2007) that shows a redundancy effect, that is, a revision performed after a non informative message in an isomorphic version of the MHP (the three prisoners problem).…”

“…In other words, the participants who have initially taken into account and understood the host's strategy will not take them into consideration to evaluate the new probability distribution in an updating interpretation. In particular when the experimenter explicitly specifies the strategy of the TV host as well as the rules of MHP, participants still give the modal response (Baratgin & Politzer, 2007;Burns & Wieth, 2004;Krauss & Wang, 2003;Shimojo & Ichikawa, 1989). …”

Updating our beliefs about inconsistency: The Monty-Hall case

“…can infer pieces of information that differ from those meant by the experimenter. This approach is new to psychological research because, other situations of revision than focusing have scarcely ever been studied (for review, see Baratgin & Politzer 2007a). In few studies, participants learn a message that specifies or invalidates an initial belief regarding a universe also considered as fixed.…”

Explanation, updating, and accuracy

“…Often, but not always: there are also reports of clear violations. While most of these reports concern the static norm of obedience to the probability axioms, a number of results indicate violations of Bayes' rule, the norm of belief dynamics (Baratgin and Politzer 2007;Douven and Schupbach 2015a;Pennington and Hastie 1992;Robinson and Hastie 1985;Zhao, Crupi, Tentori, Fitelson, and Osherson 2012). Violations of Bayes' rule might be entirely unsystematic.…”