%0 Journal Article
%T El debate acerca del efecto facilitador en problemas de probabilidad condicional: £¿ Un caso de experimentaci¨®n crucial ?
%A Moro
%A Rodrigo
%A Bodanza
%A Gustavo A
%J Interdisciplinaria
%D 2010
%I Scientific Electronic Library Online
%X in the early '70s, tversky and kahneman founded a research program in cognitive psychology called heuristics and biases. this program found extensive evidence that shows that people tend to commit reasoning errors when making judgments under uncertainty. a particular case is that people tend to fail when reasoning about conditional probability problems, that is, problems that ask for the probability of some event given the fact that another event has occurred (e.g. the probability of raining given that it is cloudy). but in the mid '90s, gigerenzer and other evolutionary psychologists came along and gave an important turn to the state of the art. they showed that if the conditional probability problems used in the literature are framed in a different way, people's performance greatly improves. more specifically, if the problems present the information under a specific format called natural frequency format, around 50% of participants get the correct answer. since the mid ¡ä90s researchers engage in an important debate on how to account for such a facilitation effect. there are two main proposals, one by the evolutionary psychology program and the other by heuristic and biases program. the natural frequency hypothesis supported by the evolutionary program basically says that the natural frequency format is the responsible factor for the improvement in people's performance. the heuristic and biases program, in turn, has proposed the nested-set hypothesis to explain the facilitation effect. the basic idea is that natural frequency versions tend to make transparent the relevant subset relations of the problem. when people see clearly the set relations involved in this kind of problems (the argument goes) they tend to use correctly base rates and thus, their performance improves. they point out that, according to this view, the success of the frequency effect does not have to do with natural frequency formats per se. they predict that any format whatsoever that make the r
%K cognitive psychology
%K conditional probability
%K facilitation effect
%K heuristic and biases program
%K evolutionary program
%K natural frequency hypothesis
%K nested-set hypothesis.
%U http://www.scielo.org.ar/scielo.php?script=sci_abstract&pid=S1668-70272010000100011&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en