The article attempts to sketch a conceptual and experimental history of the base rate issue. The review distinguishes between a social judgment paradigm and a textbook paradigm. Theoretical explanations of the base rate phenomenon, i.e. the representativeness heuristics, confusing or inverting conditional probabilities, the specific factor, the causality factor, the vividness factor etc. are discussed with respect to these paradigms. On the basis of a report on various studies, the author hypothesizes that the different paradigms elicit different response tendencies, matching base rates on the one hand and judging representativeness on the other hand. She argues that on the causal structures accepted illustrating this by several examples. The consequences of this phenomenon for the role of normativeness and its (in-) determinacy are discussed.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education