Tversky and Kahneman (1974)provided participants with personality descriptions of engineers or lawyers and asked them to choose whether the individual was a 'lawyer' or 'engineer.'Out of a supposed sample of 100 engineers and lawyers,half of participants were told that there were 70 engineers and 30 lawyers while the other half were told that there were 30 engineers and 70 lawyers.What was the main finding of this study?

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

The main finding of the study was that people often do not use the base rate (i.e., the proportion of lawyers vs engineers in the population) when provided with descriptive information about people (i.e., the personality description). Instead, participants tended to rely more heavily on the descriptive information and ignored the base rate. This is known as the base rate fallacy.

Tversky and Kahneman (1974)provided Participants with Personality Descriptions of Engineers