Like I mentioned in my previous journal, I’ve decided to do an experiment on my fellow high school students for my December SDA.
Recently, I read about an experiment involving fictional character Linda, who was written to be stereotyped as someone active in social justice. Participants were then asked “which alternative is more probable? Linda is a bank teller, or Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.” According to Kahneman, more people said the latter even though that choice is logically impossible (all bank tellers who are also active in the feminist movement are still bank tellers, but not vice versa). This demonstrates the conjunction fallacy as well as judgements of representativeness. There is also a lot to say about System 1 and 2 at play here too.
I originally considered experimenting with the availability cascade or regression to the mean but there didn’t seem to be any experiments I could replicate so I decided to go with the one above.
A reason why the experiment above matters is because it pits logic versus intuition, where incorrect intuition wins out. As a result, this could easily pervade all aspects of life since the language you use could be paramount. For example in the book, one similar experiment has logic win out once the language—and only the language—was made slightly differently. When the stakes are high, say in business dealings or public policy matters, you’ll have to be able to train yourself to recognize these fallacies in order to not make disastrous mistakes.
As of now, I just plan on recording responses and probably doing a writeup of the results, which I plan to use for the upcoming January midterm. I’ll try to emulate the original experiment as much as possible as depicted here.
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