Limited Domain Structure for Conjunction Errors
- Ethan Ludwin-Peery, New York University, New York, New York, United States
AbstractPeople make conjunction errors, rating a conjunction as more likely than one of its constituents, across many different types of problems. They commit the conjunction fallacy in problems of social judgment, in physical reasoning tasks, and in gambles of pure chance. Doctors commit the fallacy when making judgments about hypothetical patients. Do all these errors share an underlying cause? Or does the fallacy arise independently in different types of reasoning? In a series of studies, we look for structure in conjunction errors across various types of problems. We find that error magnitudes are related for some clusters of items, but there does not appear to be a universal relationship between all cases of this fallacy.