🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <BxwG6E.Evs@acsu.buffalo.edu>, rmr@acsu.buffalo.edu (Richard
M. Romanowski) writes:
|> frank@i1.msi.umn.edu (Loren Frank) writes:
|> (..)
|> >	On a slightly related topic, when people are given the following
|> >scenario :Linda has been very active in social concerns for most
|> >of her life. During college she was involved in a number of organizations
|> >whose aim was to bolster the rights of the underrepresented. 
|> >People are then asked "which of the following is more likely:
|> >1) Linda is a bank teller.
|> >2) Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement."
|> >1) Linda is a bank teller.
|> >2) Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement."
|> >People almost always choose 2) even though the likelyhood of a conjunction
|> >is always less than the likelyhood of one of the conjuncts.
|> 
|> >I am not quite sure what that means, but it is true...
|> 
|> 
|> 	I do not know anything, but I THINK it means that people don't
|> care about the bank teller part -- whether or not it is true is irrelevant
|> to them, because the part about feminism seems so intuitively correct.
|> 
|> 	Conclusion: confronted with a pattern that seems to reflect 
|> reality, people toss logic out the window, which is perhaps why we pretend
|> that math is unemptional.  If we believed it related to reality,
|> perhaps we would not be able to do it.
|> 
|> Luck
|> Rick

I think the way people perceive/understand the experiment is the reason
why they
think that 2 is more likely than 1
They hear
|> >1) Linda is a bank teller.
|> >2) Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement."
but they perceive
|> >1) Linda is a bank teller and she is NOT active in the feminist movement.
|> >2) Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement."
since this dichotomic question is much more common than a attribute with
a "don't know"
value.