Kansei Versus Extensional Reasoning : The Scientific Illusion of The Conjunction Fallacy in Probability Judgment

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Artemenkov, Sergey L.
Copyright Year	2006
Abstract	Introduction Subsequent to the investigations of Tversky and Kahneman (Tversky & Kahneman, 1983) it is well known that judgments under uncertainty are often mediated by intuitive heuristics that are not bound by specific scientific natural laws. For example, according to the conjunction rule a conjunction can be more representative than one of its constituents, and instances of a specific category can be easier to imagine or to retrieve than instances of a more inclusive category. The so called Representativeness and Availability Heuristics (RAH) therefore can make a conjunction appear more probable than one of its constituents, which breaks the most basic qualitative law of probability conjunction rule: The probability of a conjunction, P(A&B), cannot exceed the probabilities of its constituents, P(A) and P(B), because the extension (or the possibility set) of the conjunction is included in the extension of its constituents. This phenomenon was regarded as cognitive illusion and demonstrated in a variety of contexts including estimation of word frequency, personality judgment, medical prognosis, decision under risk, suspicion of criminal acts, and political forecasting. The systematic character of violations of the conjunction rule makes it absolutely unclear why such inadequate behavior takes place and occurs so often? In accordance with common normative views it raises a number of reasonable questions: Why do people often fail to take the logical form of statements into account when comparing their probabilities? (Bonini, Tentori & Osherson, 2004) or: Why are we so disinclined to coordinate probability with logical structure? (Sides, et al., 2002). In the study of these questions and cognitive illusions much of the research has been conducted so as to compare intuitive inferences and probability judgments to specific fixed scientific results the rules of statistics and the laws of probability, which, in our view, are erroneously used as objective measure of the perceptual and cognitive processes. So far considerable research has been devoted to the problem of Conjuction Fallacy. There have been proposed various solutions connected with it. Tversky and Kahneman explained the fallacious behavior by RAH and their so-called judgemental heuristics, which were criticized heavily as being far too vague to count as explanations: studies have emphasized potential ambiguity surrounding the word “probability” and concerned about misleading pragmatic influences and uncertainty about the conjunctive reading of categories (Sides A., et al., 2002). There have also been advanced special probability models explaining the fallacious behavior, e.g. the so-called theory of hints (Brachinger & Monney, 2003) and others.
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Alternate Webpage(s)	http://psycho.hes.kyushu-u.ac.jp/~lab_miura/Kansei/Workshop/proceedings/Opening_talk.pdf
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article