Sets or frequencies? how to explain the facilitation effect in conditional probability problems

MORO, RODRIGO; BODANZA, GUSTAVO ADRIÁN

ANALES DE PSICOLOGíA

UNIV MURCIA

Lugar: Murcia; Año: 2010 vol. 26 p. 181 - 188

0212-9728

Since the ’70s, the Heuristics and Biases Program in Cognitive Psychology has shown that people do not reason correctly about Bayesian or  conditional  probability  problems.  In  the  ’90s,  however,  evolutionary psychologists  discovered  that  if  the  same  problems  are  presented  in  a different  way,  people’s  performance  greatly  improves.  Two  explanations have been offered to account for this facilitation effect: the natural frequency hypothesis and the nested-set hypothesis. The empirical evidence on this debate is mixed. We review the literature and offer a clarification of the debate in terms of strategies and techniques used by the researchers in the area. We argue that the provided evidence seems to favor the nested-set hypothesis. However, we also argue that there is still room for disagreement and more empirical work is needed to settle the issue.