Are humans good intuitive statisticians after all? Rethinking some conclusions from the literature on judgment under uncertainty
Are humans good intuitive statisticians after all? Rethinking some conclusions from the literature on judgment under uncertainty
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DOI：
10.1016/0010-0277(95)00664-8
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发表时间：
1996-01-01
期刊：
影响因子：
3.4
通讯作者：
Tooby, J
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Cosmides, L;Tooby, J
长期以来，专业概率学家一直在争论概率的含义，例如，贝叶斯派认为概率指的是主观置信度，频率学家认为概率指的是世界上发生事件的频率。最近，吉格伦泽和他的同事们争辩说，这些相同的区别是由未经训练的受试者做出的，而且，对于许多领域，人类的大脑将概率信息表示为频率。我们分析了几个原因，为什么从生态学和进化论的角度来看，人类大脑中的某些类别的问题解决机制应该被期望以频率来表示概率信息。然后，使用一个在《启发式和偏见》文献中著名的引发基本比率忽略的问题，我们表明，只要用频率术语来表达问题，就可以在76%的受试者中得出正确的贝叶斯推理--实际上，在最生态有效的条件下，可以得到92%的受试者正确的贝叶斯推理。这一结果增加了越来越多的文献表明，频率主义表征导致各种认知偏差消失，包括过度自信、合取谬误和基准率忽视。综上所述，这些新的发现表明，关于不确定条件下的判断的文献中最常见的结论--我们的归纳推理机制并不包含概率演算--将不得不重新审视。从生态学和进化论的角度来看，人类最终可能会成为很好的直觉统计学家。
Professional probabilists have long argued over what probability means, with, for example, Bayesians arguing that probabilities refer to subjective degrees of confidence and frequentists arguing that probabilities refer to the frequencies of events in the world. Recently, Gigerenzer and his colleagues have argued that these same distinctions are made by untutored subjects, and that, for many domains, the human mind represents probabilistic information as frequencies. We analyze several reasons why, from an ecological and evolutionary perspective, certain classes of problem-solving mechanisms in the human mind should be expected to represent probabilistic information as frequencies. Then, using a problem famous in the ''heuristics and biases'' literature for eliciting base rate neglect, we show that correct Bayesian reasoning can be elicited in 76% of subjects - indeed, 92% in the most ecologically valid condition - simply by expressing the problem in frequentist terms. This result adds to the growing body of literature showing that frequentist representations cause various cognitive biases to disappear, including overconfidence, the conjunction fallacy, and base-rate neglect. Taken together, these new findings indicate that the conclusion most common in the literature on judgment under uncertainty - that our inductive reasoning mechanisms do not embody a calculus of probability - will have to be re-examined. From an ecological and evolutionary perspective, humans may turn out to be good intuitive statisticians after all.