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jimrandomh comments on Misleading the witness - Less Wrong
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Just because someone tells you that something has a 15% chance does not make it so. If someone offers you a 15% chance at $1M for anything less than $150k, then you should be 95% confident that they will try to cheat somehow.
Sure; but it's posed as a hypothetical. The participants know there's no real money involved. Are their conscious selves unable to prevent a subconscious defense against being scammed?
Maybe they don't have have the same concept as we do of a "hypothetical".
If their conscious selves could shut down the defense, scammers could convince it to. This kind of sphexish paranoia is adaptive, if you're the sort of person who scores low on the cognitive reflection test. Maybe.
If it's the right answer in reality, then it's the right answer in a hypothetical. People use their actual cognitive faculties for pondering hypotheticals, not imaginary ones.
They may do, but they are still missing many of the physical reactions one might have to genuinely being offered large sums of money - excitement, adrenalin etc - and these are bound to have some effect on people's decision making processes.
Perhaps a way around this would be to conduct several thought experiments with a subject in one sitting, and tell them beforehand that 'one of the offers in these thought experiments is real and you will receive what you choose - although you will not know which one until the end of the experiment'.
This would be a good way to induce their visceral reactions to the situation, and of course, disappointingly perhaps, a more modest-sum-involving thought experiment at the end could provide them with their dividend.
Also worth noting: Deal or No Deal (UK version) demonstrates the variety of reactions and strategies people have to this sort of proposition. The US version is just silly though :)
Most people don't really get hypotheticals. Even most high IQ people seem not to.
We've had this argument before, and it still looks to me like this couldn't account for the full effect of risk aversion. The fact that scammers regularly succeed means that people don't usually base their reasoning on that sort of suspicion.
People who feel secure do not, and people who do not feel secure do. Unfortunately, to someone in the latter camp, genuine opportunity really looks like a scam; it's "too good to be true".
This is a really good point. I'd feel much more confident in these sorts of results if the questions were prefaced by disclaimers stating that there is no chance whatsoever of getting ripped off, that the random decision that determines the win or loss is absolutely guaranteed to be secure and accurate, that the $1M is tax-free, will be given in secret, doesn't need to be reported to the government, etc.