Resiliency, robustness and rationality of probability judgements

Abstract

This paper addresses and rejects claims that one can demonstrate experimentally that most untutored subjects are systematically and incurably irrational in their probability judgements and in some deductive reasoning tasks. From within a strongly subjectivist theory of probability, it develops the notions of resiliency—a measure of stability of judgements—and robustness—a measure of expected stability. It then becomes possible to understand subjects’ behaviour in the Wason selection task, in examples which have been claimed to involve a ‘base‐rate fallacy’, in appearing to ignore laws of large numbers and to overestimate their own success rate as entirely rational: a matter of combining first‐order probability assignments with judgements about the robustness of those assignments.