

Items are seen as more important when put into a relatively-large group - pmcpinto
http://coglode.com/gems/category-size-bias

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Rainymood
>The first contained 5 black, 5 grey and 5 white balls.

>The second contained 2 black, 11 grey and 2 white balls. You can see here in
the second version that the grey is a relatively large category.

>Despite the fact that the chance of each ball being plucked from the lottery
bowl being equal, people were then asked to estimate the probability of a grey
number 8 ball being chosen.

>And the answers were crazy! People judged chance of choosing the grey 8 ball
to be higher in the lottery with 11 grey balls, than the one with 5 grey
balls. Put another way, because there were more grey balls than black or
white, they thought that the grey #8 ball was more likely to come up.

I felt that this result could be found easily by people simply misinterpreting
the question. I was very confused by the text in the article.

The question was: What is the chance of the grey ball LABELLED BALL NUMBER
EIGHT to be plucked. Which is obviously 1/15th in each experiment but the
question could be easily misinterpreted to mean: what is the chance of the 8th
ball being grey. I have not yet read the original reseach paper Isaac & Brough
(2014) so I might be wrong.

I just feel like that "people were then asked to estimate the probability of a
grey number 8 ball being chosen" is worded very awkwardly ...

~~~
clay_to_n
From my reading, I don't think that misinterpretation would be common. In any
case, there were multiple studies in the article that all supported the same
effect.

~~~
Rainymood
I am not arguing on the other tests, I agreed with them on almost every point.
I just was personally a bit confused when they threw the ball test at me.

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clay_to_n
I wouldn't have expected this result - the roulette example was interesting,
though I don't see an actual source for it. Very clear article, and very nice
design on the site. I'm glad to have found this, their other articles look
interesting as well.

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dgomez1092
eh, this article was interesting in that it gave a good basic overview of how
to take advantage over a small cognitive bias. It is similar to that of how
middle schoolers have a fable/imaginary audience conceptualization in their
development. If they think that there is a background story behind it then
they are more likely to act. This is qualitative at best. Just my opinion.
Thanks.

