Wason, Monty Hall, and Adverse Defaults
AbstractThe paper gives an account of several well-known cognitive illusions in terms of contextual defaults which guide intuition where familiar cues are ambiguous. When the default is inappropriate, as it sometimes must be, the result is a cognitive illusion. In contrast to Kahneman & Tversky attribute substitutions, these context substitutions are not heuristics (cognitive shortcuts) that would often give a good approximation of a correct response. Rather, they are akin to behavior in which a person instructed to look left instead somehow is prompted to look right.
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Bibliographic InfoPaper provided by Harris School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago in its series Working Papers with number 0514.
Date of creation: Dec 2005
Date of revision:
Monty Hall; Wason; Adverse Defaults; cognitive illusions;
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