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Vladimir_Golovin comments on Misleading the witness - Less Wrong
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Re. the linked article about the cognitive confusion test:
Wow. That's the most mind-blowing thing I've read in a while. I can't think of a good explanation for anyone picking the $500, let alone the male-female difference. Maybe they assume that someone might actually give them $500, but the $1M is a scam. And how does this square with the idea that poor people play the lottery more?
Princeton students scored a mean of 1.63. Heh.
Say, you're starving and if you don't get a meal today, you'll die. In such situations, the choice between 15% chance of $1 million and a sure $500 boils down to a choice between 15% chance to survive today and a 100% chance to survive today (assuming that the meal costs less than $500.)
Perhaps the people who chose $500 operate in this 'starvation mode' by default.
The general term for "people who operate in starvation mode" is "the poor".
I doubt this is the case for most of the people who would take the $500 - I'd assume it's more that most of them couldn't or just didn't think to calculate the expectation value of a 15% chance at a million.
I think people are flipping the offer in their minds and comparing a sure $500 to an 85% chance of zilch.