Abstract / Description of output
One remarkable aspect of human cognition is our ability to reason about physical events. This article provides novel evidence that intuitive physics is subject to a peculiar error, the classic conjunction fallacy, in which people rate the probability of a conjunction of two events as more likely than one constituent (a logical impossibility). Participants viewed videos of physical scenarios and judged the probability that either a single event or a conjunction of two events would occur. In Experiment 1 (n = 60), participants consistently rated conjunction events as more likely than single events for the same scenes. Experiment 2 (n = 180) extended these results to rule out several alternative explanations. Experiment 3 (n = 100) generalized the finding to different scenes. This demonstration of conjunction errors contradicts claims that such errors should not appear in intuitive physics and presents a serious challenge to current theories of mental simulation in physical reasoning.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 1602-1611 |
Number of pages | 10 |
Journal | Psychological Science |
Volume | 31 |
Issue number | 12 |
Early online date | 2 Nov 2020 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Dec 2020 |