Both tend to judge the co-occurrence of two events as more probable than one event alone:
Animals, like humans, appear to be troubled by a Linda problem.
The famous "Linda problem" was designed by psychologists to illustrate how people fall prey to what is known as the conjunction fallacy: the incorrect reasoning that if two events sometimes occur in conjunction, they are more likely to occur together than either event is to occur alone.
[...] In the 1980s, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tvesrky showed that in a variety of scenarios, humans tend to believe, irrationally, that the intersection of two events is more probable than a single event. They asked participants to answer a question based on the following scenario.
Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.
Which is more probable?
- Linda is a bank teller
- Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement
The great majority of participants chose No. 2, although logically it is less probable than Linda being a bank teller alone. After all, No. 1 would not preclude Linda from also being an active feminist, but given the description of Linda, No. 2 may be easier for respondents to imagine.
The Linda problem and numerous similar studies seem to indicate that humans estimate the likelihood of an event using mental shortcuts, assessing how similar the event is to a model they already have in their minds. [...]
To determine whether the fallacy necessarily involves language and whether it is unique to humans, González engaged rats in a physical, not social, task. With psychology professor Aaron Blaisdell, she designed two experiments that required the rats to judge the likelihood of just a sound being present or both a light and sound being present in order to receive a food reward.
[...] The tendency to overestimate the likelihood that both sound and light were present, even if it meant no reward, demonstrates that, like humans, rats can show a conjunction fallacy, the authors said.
"Until now, researchers said this is unique to human cognition only because we haven't looked for it in animals," Blaisdell said. "If humans and other animals consider alternative states of the world during ambiguous situations to help decision-making, we might expect systematic biases such as the conjunction fallacy to show a broader distribution in the animal kingdom."
Journal Reference:
González, V.V., Sadeghi, S., Tran, L. et al. The conjunction fallacy in rats [open]. Psychon Bull Rev (2023). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-023-02251-z
(Score: 5, Interesting) by sjames on Tuesday April 25, @07:36AM (26 children)
I picked option 1 immediately. Perhaps that explains why I find most management to be comparable to a pack of whiny toddlers and can't bring myself to work for them.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25, @08:22AM (12 children)
That just means that you are probably a programmer.
I would say that 90% of people who picked 2 mistakenly assumed that option 1 was equivalent to "Linda is a bank teller and not a feminist".
It's like ordering a meal;
1/ spam and chips, or
2/ spam, eggs, and chips.
There's nothing that says NO EGGS on 1/ but if you order it and expect to get eggs you'd be disappointed.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday April 25, @08:37AM (4 children)
Or I'm a programmer because I didn't have that defect in thinking.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by HiThere on Tuesday April 25, @01:25PM (2 children)
*IS* it a defect?
Perhaps the defect is in the way logic is mapped onto sentences. But the rats thing acts as a contraindication. It also seems to be a highly conserved way of thinking. I'd be cautious in claims that a highly conserved over evolutionary time characteristic is a defect.
It seems like it *ought* to be a defect is a fair way of describing it.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Immerman on Tuesday April 25, @04:36PM
The layout of our skeleton and plumbing is highly conserved - but I think it's safe to say that a giraffe having nerves go from its brain, all the way down it's neck, to loop around the aorta and go back up to its tongue is a design defect. One shared by I think all vertebrates - probably inherited from our fishy neckless ancestors, where that nerve routing was fairly direct.
LOTS of garbage design gets conserved by evolution - not because it's valuable, but because it's not a huge problem, and it's apparently difficult to make even minor changes to some things without breaking stuff. Something every programmer is familiar with.
I rather doubt logical fallacies are a major problem outside of modern civilizations - which haven't been around long enough to have much evolutionary effect (aside from a few cases of sub-groups being exposed to extreme societal pressures)
And I imagine fundamental brain wiring patterns would fall deep into the "hard to change without breaking things" category.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday April 25, @07:33PM
I think it is. It's just not significant to a rat, so evolution never corrected it. It probably isn't that significant to humans living in more primitive conditions either.
But we don't live in primitive conditions here and now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25, @11:54PM
Defect? So you would expect eggs with your breakfast if you choose 1/ ?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Opportunist on Tuesday April 25, @08:46AM (6 children)
The reason why people pick 2 is the deceptive way the question is asked.
Linda is introduced as a person who cares about social equality and has an interest in her fellow human beings. Next, we get told she has a job that is about as far away from what we consider a job dealing with humanity. Let's ask the question differently, what is more likely:
1. Linda is a social worker
2. Linda is a social worker and active in the feminist movement.
I bet that you will get VERY different answers. I would wager that way more people pick one in such a scenario.
The reason is that we expect Linda to do something "with people". Option one doesn't offer anything "with people", so people gravitate to option 2.
When you think about it, it's actually quite logical...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mhajicek on Tuesday April 25, @09:17AM (1 child)
I think it's a fuzzy logic thing. They assign a low number of points to "is a bank teller", and a higher number of points to "is active in the feminist movement". Then they pick the answer with the higher point total.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday April 25, @06:08PM
And possibly interpreting the lack of a feminism mention to be equivalent to "AND NOT active in the feminist movement"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Tuesday April 25, @01:30PM (2 children)
Sorry, but while that is a reasonable argument, it's not a logical one. Or if it is, I'd like to know the axioms and rules of inference that allow you to claim that it's logical.
To make it logical I think you need to revert to the old Greek "the way words are used" meaning of logic. (I.e., pre-Aristotle.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Tuesday April 25, @04:05PM
Yes, logic would say that any answer is more likely correct that only depends on A being true than an answer that depends on A and B being true.
People are not logical though, they react to "B being likely true" and "A being very unlikely".
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday April 25, @06:13PM
You're arguing syntax, not logic.
If you interpret the question thusly:
Linda is a bank teller and is not active in the feminist movement
Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement
They both have the same number of conditions now and it's a matter of opinion on whether an opinion-change is more likely than someone not changing their mind.
You contend that it is syntactically incorrect to interpret the question in that manner. But we imply stuff in English all the time...
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday April 25, @06:24PM
The question didn't fully explore the person's map of inferences. More fully, I concluded that 1 is true because it was a given and that while 2 was unproven, it wouldn't be that surprising. Same answer if you replace bank teller with social worker.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by anubi on Tuesday April 25, @09:04AM (7 children)
I hear you on that! I've personally witnessed two prime engineering organizations and two churches done in by management types.
I have concluded these are not bad people, but the top level people who supposedly have superior organizational skills, well, one doesn't make silk purses from sow's ears. An MBA doesn't mean one is a leader any more than an Engineering degree ( any level ) makes one an imaginative creator of technology. Some of the finest creativity I have ever seen came from self-driven people trying to solve a personal need.
Engineers are trained from the get-go to honor the laws of physics. One who fails to do this will be rewarded with one failure after another.
The MBA types are trained in money matters, psychology, marketing, and ( shudder ) something listed as "people skills", as in how to force others to see it their way
A MBA, given the control of the instruments of obedience, is apt to see the Engineer as insubordinate and disrespectful of authority. An engineer who insists it be done a certain way is apt to rise to the top of the layoff list, to be replaced by someone more docile, even though his stuff isn't so well thought out...you know..."perfectionist".
And a subordinate engineer sees the MBA as just another royal pain in the ass to have to cosset in order to get a product out the door that's useful to the customer.
One thing in particular stuck out. Rank. Once this started up, an "us" versus "them" thing was almost sure to ignite. This seems to be a universal paradigm of human psychology. This breeds useless infighting, corporate politics, while our customer goes elsewhere to find someone to help him with HIS problem!
These techniques, used without underlying wisdom, by ones wielding the "instruments of obedience", i.e. performance evaluations, power to destroy another's livelihood, is just as deadly as an engineer designing things without benefit of resources and wisdom.
Either one will completely destroy an organization.
This is kinda off topic, but I just wanted it out there, what I saw from inside the beast.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday April 25, @03:23PM
Engineers, in the pursuit of a good solution, can also kill an organisation. "Perfect is the enemy of good enough" and all that.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Tuesday April 25, @05:20PM (5 children)
I think the problem is that MBA types are trained in skills valuable for managing people. Which can make them good managers, but contributes nothing to leadership.
A manager just needs to be good at getting their team to work together to accomplish their assigned goals. They don't need to understand the work being done - only how to get the people that know how to do it to work together well.
A leader though needs to decide what those goals goals should be. Leaders are the ones steering the boat, and to do that well they need a good understanding of both the capabilities of the boat, and the nature of the waters being navigated. What they *don't* need is to be able to manage people - they just need to hire good managers and tell them what needs to be done.
The problem is that we conflate management and leadership, considering the leader(s) of a company to be top-level management, rather than requiring an entirely different skill set. Which means managers getting promoted to lead larger and larger teams, until finally they lead the whole company - at which point everything starts to fall apart because they don't actually understand what the company does - only how to get the people within it to work well together. And far too often not even that - instead being really good at playing politics for self-promotion, which is a completely worthless skill at the top.
Add in our tendency towards hierarchical thinking - attributing greater value to those who indirectly manage more people, and you've got a recipe for disaster.
I do wonder what would happen with a company that put the workers collectively in control of management. E.g. a manager can be fired by the people they manage, and can only get a raise or promotion if the people "below" them vote in favor of it. Put the people who actually know how to do the job in charge of deciding who is fit to lead them. Or at the very least give them veto power - like congress being able to veto the actions of the president.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Tuesday April 25, @06:53PM (4 children)
There's a lot to that. Manager should be part of a team but there is no justification for a superior/subordinate role there. If I *HAD* to assign superiority and/or importance somehow, the manager would not be the superior or the more important. Lets take engineering for an example. A group of engineers without a manager is FAR more likely to self organize into a more or less functional team and get decent engineering done than a group of managers without engineers. The former probably won't function optimally and may not even function well but at least the building won't collapse under it's own weight.
Add on top that in many organizations, the manager gets better pay, better parking, a better office (or an office at all), even better chairs in many cases. Almost like the last half a millennium or so taught us nothing about feudalism.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday April 25, @07:24PM
Oh, it taught us plenty.
Mostly it taught the people with power that this democracy bullshit tramples over their "right" to be unrepentant bastards, and they should do everything they can to stomp it out.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26, @04:54AM (2 children)
Yup. That's what happened about 40 years ago in my neck of the woods too. Having an MBA was all the rage among the financial types who were buying up all sorts of what we're money making stable firms that made things.
Exactly what you said. 20 years engineering experience wasn't valued as highly as 2-year MBA add-on degree. Privilege of rank thing. .Subordination to ones who could not relate to what we did
Same problem Doctors have with Managed Care facilities.
An Engineer represents the customer. Every engineer has been a customer. And we knew it when it wasn't right. That's the reason we became engineers in the first place. We were pissed off with something that should have not disappointed.
Just as a doctor should advocate for his patient
And the Executives advocate for the stockholders.
Which puts publicly owned companies in a really stressful situation of internal conflict.
I've worked under both. And one that got bought out by an investor group. They quickly went down and out when the customer base 40 years in the making discovered we now existed "in name only" and we're no longer capable of meeting their needs.
I'll share a case in point. Weller soldering guns.
When I was a kid in the 50's, my Dad bought me a Weller D-550 soldering gun. Top of the line tool. Dad taught me how to solder using it. I got really good at it, learning all sorts of metallurgy of solders and fluxes. Many times I brought it to work to work on a difficult situation, and I did not want yet more variables in the fray ( golfers know this well..they want their own clubs too!).
Well, I foolishly lent it to a neighbor who dropped it on the cement, even as I was urging him to be careful with it. To say I went full emo-tard emotionally ballistic is a gross understatement. All I could think of is the memories that tool was in that Weller didn't make them this way anymore. Mine was the old school design where one pushed the tip wires through holes in the nuts, bent the wire over with lineman's pliers, then snugged it into the transformer secondary.
I remember Dad showing me that design, even taking the gun apart to show me how the transformer was wound, how the magnetic and electrical circuits worked together to make the gun work. Over 1000 amps flow in the secondary, but only a couple hundred millivolts drive. Just the slightest resistance from a poor job of snugging the nuts and the gun won't work right, and also get hot in the wrong place.
But I lost it, emotionally, and publicly displayed a side of me that even I wasn't aware I had. Way overreacted. A brand new D550 goes for less than $100 on eBay. But it's not the same. The new design has setscrews, not that big clamping nut. And the transformer secondary does not appear to be copper like my old one is, rather it appeared to be sort of aluminum alloy. And it's wattage ratings are now 260/200 watt instead of the 240/325 watts my older gun is rated at. I noted they even changed the trigger so that a full squeeze gave lower power.
The new design also has warnings about it's duty cycle...20% ON time. I had run my old D550 far harder than that.
I had brought my old Weller to work, as our customer had a 300 amp low voltage connection in one the devices we were building for him, and the lessons Dad and the soldering gun were in me. Besides, it was going into marine use, and Dad had a special way of preparing marine wiring stranded wire...tin both wire and connector, use plenty of flux, insert wire, crimp, solder again. The solder fill will displace water that will wick in and result in failure in about three years.
Anyway, my neighbor went way out of his way to replace my gun with an exact same construction, found on Craigslist. The vintage gun. About a 100 mile drive. Now, that spoke volumes to me. I am very embarrassed over some things I said while in my temper tantrum.
Later, I found an Ebay seller offering a known bad D650, upgraded industrial gun, for about $50. I bought it just for it's housing, as the Weller 8250, D550, and D650 all use the same housing.
Upon examining the "defective" gun, it was obvious to me the poor customer had tried to make the thing work and stripped the the little screw that held the tip. Yes, the 1000 amp circuit.
You see, Carl Weller, a frustrated radio repairman, got tired of waiting for his big iron to warm up, and designed his transformer based gun, focused all the secondary current into an exposed short circuit of smaller wire...the tip. Easily replaceable. Intrinsically safe..millivolts.
But the big corporate behemoth, run for maximum profit by investors, seem to have not an inkling of Carl's design skill and butchered his work.
What kind of employee does Corporate need?
If they need a product that fills their customer's need, they need someone like Carl.
If they need someone that looks good wearing suit and tie, gives good business handshakes, good in marketing, cost-cutting, and creative coverups, you need people like is all over LinkedIn.
It takes decades to season a "worker-bee", but you can train a MBA in two years, and make the worker bees subordinate to it. Add "sibling rivalry" to the mix by granting special privilege to the ones who opted for business training in lieu of training to do what the customer wanted, and one can easily see why we don't build much in America. We eat, shake hands, shuffle papers, and print money.
And butcher perfectly good designs for soldering guns.
Incidentally, if you've got one of these newer D550 style guns with the setscrews on the side, it's a 1/4-28NF thread, and you can get some decent stainless steel full sized bolts for it at a good hardware store that fit the standard 7/16 inch wrenches. Just to make the best of what I think is a piss poor design.
The original through-the-nut design was also 7/16 inch...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26, @09:09AM (1 child)
You should use your journal for things like this.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday April 26, @09:35AM
As well as, not instead of.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25, @09:57AM
Posit: current AI based on large training sets works at least a little bit like the way people and animals learn/think/reason (pick any combination).
If you accept that for a moment, then it looks pretty obvious that the people that get the Linda question wrong are people that didn't have the right training set (for example, no training in logic).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25, @12:00PM
Isn't it the usual issue of people find or think that more information is, or appear, to be better or more accurate. In the experiment tho one is as noted part of the other.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday April 25, @02:43PM (2 children)
And I immediately imagined an option 3), "Linda is active in the feminist movement", and picked that. This test looks too much like the false dilemma.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday April 25, @05:22PM
Which was not an option, so you picked wrong.
The entire point of logical fallacies is that people will reliably pick the obviously wrong answer because it "feels right" due to such inapplicable thinking.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday April 25, @06:57PM
I considered that to also be likely, but wasn't the question asked.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Tuesday April 25, @08:25AM (4 children)
Nothing in that description would lead me to the conclusion that Linda was a bank teller. So the most likely conclusion is that neither answer is correct, since there are thousands if not millions other jobs that Linda could have that are probably more suited to her interests.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25, @08:45AM (3 children)
(Score: 1, Redundant) by Opportunist on Tuesday April 25, @08:54AM (2 children)
If you ask which of these scenarios is more likely, no matter how unlikely either answer would be, yes, the answer is one. But on a pure statistical level, not on a "human" one.
I can quite well understand why people would come to the conclusion that option 2 is more likely, simply because of how the question is asked. People are people. Not statisticians.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday April 25, @04:47PM (1 child)
And... you just described the nature of a logical fallacy.
The entire point of a logical fallacy is that people will reliably believe something that's obviously false because it "feels right" and they suck at actually thinking things through.
(Score: 3, Touché) by deimtee on Tuesday April 25, @11:50PM
The problem isn't a failure of logic, it is a failure of assumptions. Given two choices, one of which specifically includes "Linda is a feminist" the assumption is that the other option means "Linda is NOT a feminist".
This is not a logic failure it is just the way the world works. If things are not specified you don't get them. Try pointing out to your boss that your contract doesn't say you won't get a brand new Ferrari as a company car.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 2) by MIRV888 on Tuesday April 25, @09:24AM (1 child)
So you're willing to throw #1 on the pile because you know #2 is very likely.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday April 25, @04:39PM
Sounds reasonable to me.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by pTamok on Tuesday April 25, @09:54AM (1 child)
I agree with others that the question is designed to be misleading to people, as it preys on people making judgements in line with their social skills.
If the question were re-phrased:
Then I think more people would come to the probabilistically correct solution. There is a lot of misdirection and priming in the question, even down to the implied "Is it probable that...(Linda) is active in the feminist movement"
Part of clear thinking is practising detection of priming and misdirection, and applying rigour.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by coolgopher on Tuesday April 25, @11:36AM
Yes Minister [youtube.com] keeps staying ever so relevant.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Gaaark on Tuesday April 25, @11:52AM
1. Trump is an idiot and nobody should vote for him.
2. Trump is an idiot: even his past supporters were caught saying he's an idiot, and nobody should vote for him.
"You've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do you, punk?"
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Interesting) by GloomMower on Tuesday April 25, @02:37PM
Years of standardized tests, trying to test our reading comprehension and see if we can understand things not explicitly mentioned have taught us to answer number 2 on this.
If however you are primed with other math or probability questions first, I think you might answer it differently.
(Score: 2) by OrugTor on Tuesday April 25, @04:55PM
The rats are not being tasked with the Linda problem. They are responding to stimuli and food. What the researchers should be presenting as results is that laboratory rats responded to light + sound more than just sound. There are a lot of assumptions when you try to deduce how the rat thinks based on its actions. After that you take a giant leap of faith to say, "See, that's what humans do."
Another factor is they are not just rats but laboratory rats. They spend a lot of time in cages then suddenly they are in a Japanese game show where thay have to figure out a puzzle to get food. Is it possible the lab rat assumes the more complicated solution is to be preferred? A human thrown into a maze without consent will assume the way to food will be the hardest route (we know this from movies.)
The Linda nonsense is just a way to engage readers and sell the research. In other words, marketing BS.