Reasoning with frequencies vs. reasoning with probabilities
Though it's frustrating that we humans seem so poorly designed for explicit probabilistic reasoning, we can often dramatically improve our performance on these sorts of tasks with a quick fix: just translate probabilities into frequencies.
Recently, Gigerenzer (1994) hypothesized that humans reason better when information is phrased in terms of relative frequencies, instead of probabilities, because we were only exposed to frequency data in the ancestral environment (e.g., 'I've found good hunting h... (read more)
Reasoning with frequencies vs. reasoning with probabilities
Though it's frustrating that we humans seem so poorly designed for explicit probabilistic reasoning, we can often dramatically improve our performance on these sorts of tasks with a quick fix: just translate probabilities into frequencies.
Recently, Gigerenzer (1994) hypothesized that humans reason better when information is phrased in terms of relative frequencies, instead of probabilities, because we were only exposed to frequency data in the ancestral environment (e.g., 'I've found good hunting h... (read more)