. (Hertwig and Gigerenzer, pg. 276) Hertwig and Gigerenzer, however, argue that this is not necessarily the case. They argue that a content-blind normative model is not a proper means of assessing human reasoning, i.e. (P & Q) is never * (P v Q). Hertwig and Gigerenzer place a greater emphasis on natural language and our understanding of the term probability in this problem. Their study is a “step toward integrating content, context, and representation of information.” (Hertwig and Gigerenzer, pg. 276) Hertwig and Gigerenzer believe the word “probable” is the key to the Linda problem. In their opinion, when people read the problem as presented by Tversky and Kahneman, they did not infer the mathematical definition of the word “probable.” Rather, a more casual interpretation of the word was taken, i.e. strength of argument or intensity of belief. Under this definition it is very reasonable for people to say that T and F is more probable than T. The selection of T and F to be more probable than T “creates a story.” That is, they wanted to strengthen their beliefs about Linda’s biography. They did this by selecting T & F (an activist with a respectable job) to be more probable than T (a mundane bank teller) alone. (Hertwig and Gigerenzer, pg. 277-79)Hertwig and Gigerenzer conducted three studies to illustrate their argument that a nonmathematical meaning of “probability” is inferred in the original Linda problem. In the first experiment, after posing the Linda problem, they asked the participants to paraphrase the word “probability” in the. Then they asked them to check off their understood definition of the word “probability” as used in the problem from a list of definitions. As expected, there was a high rate of the conjunction fallacy. Most of the subjects, however, indicated that they understood “probability” to have a no...
