Is it a judgment of representativeness? Re-examining the birth sequence problem
Tóm tắt
Although all birth orders in the “birth sequence problem” are equiprobable, most participants judge the less representative order as less likely than the more representative order. But this well-known problem confounds representativeness with the direction in which birth orders are compared. We hypothesized and corroborated in three experiments (total N = 1,136) that participants pragmatically infer the birth orders’ relative prevalence from the direction of comparison. Experiment 1 found that participants judged the less representative sequence as more common when we reversed the comparison. Experiment 2 reproduced these results despite removing representativeness as a cue. In Experiment 3, participants preferred to place the relatively common sequence as the referent in an inverted “speaker” problem. Our results turn the iconic problem’s interpretation on its head: Rather than indicating flawed human cognition, the birth sequence problem illustrates people’s ability to adaptively extract subtle linguistic meaning beyond the literal content.
Tài liệu tham khảo
Chahnazarian, A. (1988). Determinants of the sex ratio at birth: Review of recent literature. Social Biology, 35(3-4), 214–235.
Chater, N., & Oaksford, M. (1999). Ten years of the rational analysis of cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 3(2), 57–65.
Chestnut, E. K., & Markman, E. M. (2018). “Girls are as good as boys at math” implies that boys are probably better: A study of expressions of gender equality. Cognitive Science, 42, 2229–2249.
Gershman, S. J., Horvitz, E. J., & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2015). Computational rationality: A converging paradigm for intelligence in brains, minds, and machines. Science, 349, 273–278.
Gigerenzer, G. (1991). How to make cognitive illusions disappear: Beyond “heuristics and biases”. European Review of Social Psychology, 2, 83–115.
Gigerenzer, G. (1996). On narrow norms and vague heuristics: A reply to Kahneman and Tversky (1996). Psychological Review, 103, 592–596.
Gleitman, L., Gleitman, H., Miller, C., & Ostrin, R. (1996). Similar, and similar concepts. Cognition, 58(3), 321–376.
Griffiths, T. L., Lieder, F., & Goodman, N. D. (2015). Rational use of cognitive resources: Levels of analysis between the computational and the algorithmic. Topics in Cognitive Science, 7(2), 217–229.
Griffiths, T. L., Daniels, D., Austerweil, J. L., & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2018). Subjective randomness as statistical inference. Cognitive Psychology, 103, 85–109.
Hahn, U., & Warren, P. A. (2009). Perceptions of randomness: Why three heads are better than four. Psychological Review, 116, 454–461.
Hastie, R., & Dawes, R. (2001). Rational choice in an uncertain world: The psychology of judgment and decision making. Sage.
Hertwig, R., & Gigerenzer, G. (1999). The 'conjunction fallacy' revisited: How intelligent inferences look like reasoning errors. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 12(4), 275–305.
Hertwig, R., & Herzog, S. M. (2009). Fast and frugal heuristics: Tools of social rationality. Social Cognition, 27(5), 661–698.
James, W. H. (1987). The human sex ratio. Part I: Review of the literature. Human Biology, 59(5), 721–752.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking fast and slow. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1972). Subjective probability: A judgment of representativeness. Cognitive Psychology, 3, 430–454.
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1973). On the psychology of prediction. Psychological Review, 80(4), 237–251.
Koehler, J. J. (1996). The base rate fallacy reconsidered: Descriptive, normative, and methodological challenges. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 19(1), 1–17.
Krijnen, J. M. T., Tannenbaum, D., & Fox, C. R. (2017). Choice architecture 2.0: Behavioral policy as an implicit social interaction. Behavioral Science & Policy, 3(2), 1–18.
Lewis, M. (2016). The undoing project: A friendship that changed our minds. Norton.
McKenzie, C. R. M. (2004). Framing effects in inference tasks -- and why they are normatively defensible. Memory and Cognition, 32, 874–885.
McKenzie, C. R. M., & Nelson, J. D. (2003). What a speaker’s choice of frame reveals: Reference points, frame selection, and framing effects. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 10, 596–602.
McKenzie, C. R. M., Sher, S., Leong, L. M., & Müller-Trede, J. (2018). Constructed preferences, rationality, and choice architecture. Review of Behavioral Economics, 5, 337–360.
Miller, J. B., & Sanjurjo, A. (2018). Surprised by the hot hand fallacy? A truth in the law of small numbers. Econometrica, 86(6), 2019–2047.
Nickerson, R. S. (2002). The production and perception of randomness. Psychological Review, 109, 330–357.
Rosch, E. (1975). Cognitive reference points. Cognitive Psychology, 7, 532–547.
Schwarz, N. (1994). Judgment in a social context: Biases, shortcomings, and the logic of conversation. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 26, 123–162.
Sher, S., & McKenzie, C. R. M. (2006). Information leakage from logically equivalent frames. Cognition, 101, 467–494.
Stanovich, K. E. (1999). Who is rational?: Studies of individual differences in reasoning. Mahwah, NJ: Elrbaum.
Tannenbaum, D., Valasek, C. J., Knowles, E. D., & Ditto, P. H. (2013). Incentivizing wellness in the workplace: Sticks (not carrots) send stigmatizing signals. Psychological Science, 24(8), 1512–1522.
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185, 1124–1131.
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1983). Extensional versus intuitive reasoning: The conjunction fallacy in probability judgment. Psychological Review, 90, 293–315.
Wänke, M., & Reuter, L. (2010). Direction-of-comparison effects: How and why comparing apples with oranges is different from comparing oranges with apples. In G. Keren (Ed.), Perspectives on Framing (pp. 177–194). Psychology Press.
Wertheimer, M. (1938). Numbers and numerical concepts in primitive peoples. In W. D. Ellis (Ed.), A source book of Gestalt psychology (pp. 265–273). The Gestalt Journal Press.
Zietsch, B. P., Walum, H., Lichtenstein, P., Verweij, K. J., & Kuja-Halkola, R. (2020). No genetic contribution to variation in human offspring sex ratio: a total population study of 4.7 million births. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 287(1921), 20192849.