Related Experiment Video
Updated: Mar 3, 2026

A Psychophysics Paradigm for the Collection and Analysis of Similarity Judgments
Published on: March 1, 2022
Not that neglected! Base rates influence related and unrelated judgments
1Centre for Economic Psychology and Decision Sciences, Kozminski University, Jagiellońska 59, 03-301 Warsaw, Poland.
Abstract:
It is claimed that people are unable (or unwilling) to incorporate prior probabilities into posterior assessments, such as their estimation of the likelihood of a person with characteristics typical of an engineer actually being an engineer given that they are drawn from a sample including a very small number of engineers. This paper shows that base rates are incorporated in classifications (Experiment 1) and, moreover, that base rates also affect unrelated judgments, such as how well a provided description of a person fits a stereotypical engineer (Experiment 2). Finally, Experiment 3 shows that individuals who make both types of assessments - though using base rates to the same extent in the former judgments - are able to decrease the extent to which they incorporate base rates in the latter judgments.
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