The Conjunction Fallacy

The present investigation adopted a debiasing approach to the judgmental error known as the conjunction fallacy (Tversky & Kahneman, 1982). Such an approach was used to determine the extent to which the conjunction fallacy reflects task specific misunderstanding of particular judgment problems. The results suggest that (a) subjects' misunderstanding of conjunction problems is indeed somewhat task specific, and (b) a debiasing approach can effectively lower but not eliminate the conjunctive error rate for problems that do not strongly implicate representativeness thinking. Educational strategies based on statistical and probabilistic knowledge are discussed as an approach to debiasing inferential errors like the conjunction fallacy.