The Base-Rate Fallacy in Probability Judgments

Bar-Hillel, M. (1980). The Base-Rate Fallacy in Probability Judgments. Acta Psychologica, 44(3), 211-233.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1980

Volume

44

Issue

3

Pages

211-233

ISSN

0001-6918

DOI

10.1016/0001-6918(80)90046-3

DOI registrant

Elsevier

Link

https://doi.org/10.1016/0001-6918(80)90046-3

Cited by

4 citations across 4 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Domain-specific

• Base Rate
  • Tversky and Kahneman documented judgments that insufficiently respond to prior probabilities, and Bar-Hillel analyzed conditions under which people attend to or ignore base-rate information.
• Base Rate Fallacy
  • People who can compute fluently still commit it when the evidence is concrete and the base rate abstract, because the mechanism is representativeness, not arithmetic incompetence. Not curable by warning people to be careful. Because the error is structural rather than a lapse of effort, telling reasoners the answer is counterintuitive leaves their estimate near the likelihood

    Supported in partVerified against the source

    Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

Mechanisms

• Likelihood-Ratio Frame
  • Its strength is that it dissolves the most stubborn error in the whole archetype — the base rate fallacy, in which a strong-looking test result is read as a strong-looking diagnosis while the prevalence is ignored

    This sourceDescribes the base-rate fallacy as overweighting case-specific diagnostic information while neglecting relevant base rates.

• Self-Status Cross-Check
  • Building the adversary's spoofing model into the weighting is what keeps it from being trivially gamed, and guarding against the base-rate fallacy

    This sourceDefines the base-rate fallacy as neglecting prior probabilities when evaluating case-specific evidence.

Verification

Does it exist? Confirmed. This work's DOI resolves to a registered record, which fixes its identity. That is all it fixes.

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Registry ID ref:1fb9966f2cff · see in the full table