The 'conjunction fallacy' revisited: How intelligent inferences look like reasoning errors

Journal of Behavioral Decision Making

Volumn 12, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 275-305

  Hertwig, Ralph ^a   Gigerenzer, Gerd ^a  

^a MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR HUMAN DEVELOPMENT   (Germany)

Author keywords

Conjunction fallacy; Frequentistic thinking; Probabalistic thinking; Probability

Indexed keywords

EID: 22844456018     PISSN: 08943257     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1002/(SICI)1099-0771(199912)12:4<275::AID-BDM323>3.0.CO;2-M     Document Type: Article

References (29)

1. Adler, J. 'Abstraction is uncooperative', Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 14 (1984), 165-181.
2. Adler, J. E. 'An optimist's pessimism: Conversation and conjunction', Posnan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and Humanities, 21 (1991), 251-282.
3. Agnoli, F. and Krantz, D. H. 'Suppressing natural heuristics by formal instruction; The case of the conjunction fallacy', Cognitive Psychology, 21 (1989), 515-550.
4. Ahn, W. K. and Bailenson, J. 'Causal attribution as a search for underlying mechanisms: An explanation of the conjunction fallacy and the discounting principle', Cognitive Psychology, 31 (1996), 82-123.
5. Bar-Hillel, M. and Neter, E. 'How alike is it versus how likely is it: A disjunction fallacy in probability judgments', Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65 (1993), 1119-1131.
6. Birnbaum, M. H. 'Controversies in psychological measurement', in Wegener, B. (ed.), Social Attitudes and Psychophysical Measurement (pp. 401-485), Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1982.
7. Birnbaum, M. H. and Mellers, B. A. 'Bayesian inference: Combining base rates with opinions of sources who vary in credibility', Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45 (1983), 792-804.
8. Bless, H., Strack, F. and Schwarz, N. 'The informative functions of research procedures: Bias and the logic of conversation', European Journal of Social Psychology, 23 (1993), 149-165.
9. Budescu, D. V. and Wallsten, T. S. 'Processing linguistic probabilities: General principles and empirical evidence', in Busemeyer, J., Hastie, R. and Medin, D. L. (eds), Decision Making from the Perspective of Cognitive Psychology (pp. 275-318), New York: Wiley, 1995.
10. Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
11. Chase, V. M., Hertwig, R. and Gigerenzer, G. 'Visions of rationality', Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2 (1998), 206-214.
12. Cohen, J. Statistical Power analysis for the Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edn, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1988.
13. Cosmides, L. and Tooby, J. 'Are humans good intuitive statisticians after all? Rethinking some conclusions from the literature on judgment under uncertainty', Cognition, 58 (1996), 1-73.
14. Daston, L. J. Classical Probability in the Enlightenment, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.
15. Donovan, S. and Epstein, S. 'The difficulty of the Linda conjunction problem can be attributed to its simultaneous concrete and unnatural representation, and not to conversational implicature', Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 33 (1997), 1-20.
16. Duden 'Das große Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache', Mannheim: Dudenverlag, 1981.
17. Dulany, D. E. and Hilton, D. J. 'Conversational implicature, conscious representation and the conjunction fallacy', Social Cognition, 9 (1991), 85-110.
18. Erdfelder, E., Bröder, A. and Brandt, M. Zur Bedeutung des Antwortformats für die Häufigkeit von Konjunktionsfehlern [The relevance of response format for the frequency of conjunction errors]. Talk presented at the 40th Tagung experimentell arbeitender Psychologen in Marburg, Germany, 1998.
19. Fabre, J.-M., Caverni, J. P. and Jungermann, H. 'Causality does influence conjunctive probability judgments if context and design allow for it', Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 63 (1995), 1-5.
20. Fiedler, K. 'The dependence of the conjunction fallacy on subtle linguistic factors', Psychological Research, 50 (1988), 123-129.
21. Gigerenzer, G. 'Why the distinction between single-event probabilities and frequencies is relevant for psychology (and vice versa)', in Wright, G. and Ayton, P. (eds), Subjective Probability (pp. 129-161), New York: Wiley, 1994.
22. Gigerenzer, G. 'On narrow norms and vague heuristics: A reply to Kahneman and Tversky', Psychological Review, 103 (1996), 592-596.
23. Gigerenzer, G. and Hoffrage, U. 'How to improve Bayesian reasoning without instruction: Frequency formats', Psychological Review, 102 (1995), 684-704.
24. Gigerenzer, G., Hoffrage, U. and Kleinbölting, H. 'Probabilistic mental models: A Brunswikian theory of confidence', Psychological Review, 98 (1991), 506-528.
25. Gigerenzer, G. and Murray, D. J. Cognition as Intuitive Statistics, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1987.
26. Gigerenzer, G. and Regier, T. 'How do we tell an association from a rule? Comment on Sloman (1996)', Psychological Bulletin, 119 (1996), 23-26.
27. Gigerenzer, G., Swijtink, Z., Porter, T., Daston, L., Beatty, J. and Krüger, L. The Empire of Chance: How probability changed science and everyday life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
28. Gould, S. J. Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in natural history, New York: Norton, 1992.
29. Grice, H. P. 'Logic and conversation', in Cole, P. and Morgan, J. L. (eds), Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech acts (pp. 41-58), New York: Academic Press, 1975.