Frequency versus probability formats in statistical word problems

被引:108
作者
Evans, JSBT [1 ]
Handley, SJ
Perham, N
Over, DE
Thompson, VA
机构
[1] Univ Plymouth, Dept Psychol, Ctr Thinking & Language, Plymouth PL4 8AA, Devon, England
[2] Univ Sunderland, Sch Social & Int Studies, Sunderland, England
[3] Univ Saskatchewan, Dept Psychol, Saskatoon, SK S7N 0W0, Canada
基金
英国经济与社会研究理事会;
关键词
frequency; probability; statistical word problems;
D O I
10.1016/S0010-0277(00)00098-6
中图分类号
B84 [心理学];
学科分类号
04 ; 0402 ;
摘要
Three experiments examined people's ability to incorporate base rate information when judging posterior probabilities, Specifically, we tested the (Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1996), Are humans good intuitive statisticians after all? Rethinking some conclusions from the literature on judgement under uncertainty. Cognition, 58, 1-73) conclusion that people's reasoning appears to follow Bayesian principles when they are presented with information in a frequency format, but not when information is presented as one case probabilities. First, we found that frequency formats were not generally associated with better performance than probability formats unless they were presented in a manner which facilitated construction of a set inclusion mental model. Second, we demonstrated that the use of frequency information may promote biases in the weighting of information. When participants are asked to express their judgements in frequency rather than probability format, they were more likely to produce the base rate as their answer, ignoring diagnostic evidence. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
引用
收藏
页码:197 / 213
页数:17
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