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Walter the Banker: The Conjunction Fallacy Reconsidered

Hartmann, Stephan and Meijs, Wouter (2009) Walter the Banker: The Conjunction Fallacy Reconsidered. [Preprint]

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Abstract

In a famous experiment by Tversky and Kahneman (1983), featuring Linda the bank teller, the participants assign a higher probability to a conjunction of propositions than to one of the conjuncts, thereby seemingly committing a probabilistic fallacy. In this paper, we discuss a slightly different example featuring someone named Walter, who also happens to work at a bank, and argue that, in this example, it is rational to assign a higher probability to the conjunction of suitably chosen propositions than to one of the conjuncts. By pointing out the similarities between Tversky and Kahneman's experiment and our example, we argue that the participants in the experiment may assign probabilities to the propositions in question in such a way that it is also rational for them to give the conjunction a higher probability than one of the conjuncts.


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Item Type: Preprint
Creators:
CreatorsEmailORCID
Hartmann, Stephan
Meijs, Wouter
Additional Information: This paper will appear in Synthese.
Keywords: Conjunction fallacy, Linda problem, psychology of reasoning, Bayesian epistemology
Subjects: Specific Sciences > Probability/Statistics
General Issues > Decision Theory
General Issues > Confirmation/Induction
Specific Sciences > Psychology
Depositing User: Stephan Hartmann
Date Deposited: 09 Jun 2009
Last Modified: 07 Oct 2010 15:18
Item ID: 4696
Subjects: Specific Sciences > Probability/Statistics
General Issues > Decision Theory
General Issues > Confirmation/Induction
Specific Sciences > Psychology
Date: June 2009
URI: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/4696

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