The view that people fail to use base-rate information appropriately in making various judgments and decisions may have a weaker empirical and logical foundation than many judgment and decision scientists have assumed. We agree with Koehler and we offer two examples, one from the attribution literature and one from a legal decision context, to argue that there is no logical imperative mandating the way base-rate information should be used for these types of judgments and decisions.
People engage in many behaviors that are dysfunctional in one sense or another.
The list of possible examples is almost endless, ranging from small financial matters such as not consolidating credit card debt to more life-threatening behaviors such as drunk driving or risky sexual practices. Cognitive psychologists have been particularly concerned with the processes that give rise to faulty judgment rather than dysfunctional behaviors themselves, but it is presumed that these judgments mediate bad decisions and resultant behaviors. In particular, we are in agreement with the argument that base-rate information may not map into certain types of problems in a manner that is required by normative considerations of Bayes' Theorem or any other logical or mathematical imperative. We offer two examples of our point. People's tendency not to use consensus information in the specified way has been interpreted as evidence for base-rate neglect.