Logical fallacies: A behavioral approach to reasoning.

Important phenomena in the area of judgment and decision making may be profitably studied with behavior-analytical techniques. We discuss three examples of such research: base-rate neglect, in which people ignore critical background information in favor of less reliable case-specific information; the conjunction fallacy, in which people report that the conjunction of two events is more likely to have occurred than one of the events alone; and the sunk-cost effect, in which people are unwilling to abandon a course of action which has already incurred substantial cost. ********** When the area of human decision making (or judgment or choice) is mentioned, most psychologists assume that the reference is to the large body of work produced by cognitive and social psychologists. Since behavior analysis has long focused on choice (though most often in non-human subjects) it should have much to contribute to the discussion and analysis of human decisions. For example, the most recent Subject Index for the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior (November 2002, for volumes 61 through 78) has far more citations to "choice" than to any other content area. Most of these studies involve non-human subjects. Perhaps some behavior analysts understandably prefer the orderly functional relations produced by pigeons and other nonhuman subjects to the chaos and variability that often plagues research with humans. One reason for the variability, of course, is the difficulty in gaining precise environmental and historical control of human behavior (one of several gallant exceptions is the research of Bernstein & Ebbesen, 1978). But ostensibly aberrant human behavior can be a rich source for appreciating the dynamics of choice if we are able to pinpoint its determinants. Moreover, a comparison of human and non-human behavior in comparable settings can also prove illuminating. In this short paper we review some of the areas in which we are trying to better understand nortoptimal (and often irrational or illogical) human behavior. In so doing we will briefly review the status of several important phenomena that have been uncovered and largely monopolized by cognitive and social psychologists. We attempt to show that behavior analysis can contribute clarity to judgment and decision making. Our laboratory is currently exploring at least the following seven research areas involving human decisions: (1) probability matching (also probability learning) or the tendency, in a binary decision task, for humans to match their choices to the probabilities of the payoffs rather than maximizing reward by always choosing the more likely payoff (e.g., Fantino & Esfandiari, 2002); (2) "information avoidance" or the tendency of humans and nonhumans to prefer "no news" to "bad news" (e.g., Fantino & Case, 1983; Case, Ploog, & Fantino, 1990); (3) self-control as assessed in variants of the classic Prisoner's Dilemma Game, in which subjects maximize short-term gains at the expense of larger delayed payoffs (developed by Brown & Rachlin, 1999); (4) the effects of learning problems (including analogy and algebra problems) with and without rules (both induced and instructed rules) on transfer to different problems (e.g., Glaz, Stolarz-Fantino, and Fantino, 2001); (5) base-rate neglect in which people (but not pigeons) often ignore critical background information in favor of less reliable case-specific information, when assessing the probability of a future event (e.g., Goodie & Fantino, 1995, 1996, 1999; Kalmeman & Tversky, 1973); (6) the conjunction fallacy, in which humans report that the conjunction of two events is more rather than less likely to have occurred than one of the events alone (e.g., Tversky & Kahneman, 1983; Stolarz-Fantino, Fantino, & Kulik, 1996; Stolarz-Fantino, Fantino, Zizzo, and Wen, 2003); (7) the sunk-cost effect, in which humans are unwilling to abandon a course of action which has already involved substantial cost (e. …