ABSTRACT
As well as inventing or popularizing some of the most important paradigms in our field, Jonathan Evans has also investigated paradigms devised by other researchers. For example, Jonathan and his colleagues have made important empirical and theoretical contributions to our understanding of base rate neglect, one of the phenomena first demonstrated by Kahneman and Tversky (see Evans, Handley, Over, & Perham, 2002; Evans, Handley, Perham, Over, & Thompson, 2000). With one of the authors of this chapter he has investigated the related phenomenon of pseudodiagnosticity (see Evans, Venn, & Feeney, 2002; Feeney, Evans, & Clibbens, 2000; Feeney, Evans, & Venn, 2008), first demonstrated by Doherty and colleagues (see Doherty, Mynatt, Tweney, & Schiavo, 1979). Our subject here will be the conjunction fallacy, another phenomenon explored by Kahneman and Tversky (see Tversky & Kahneman, 1983). Given its notoriety it is somewhat surprising that Jonathan has not worked on the conjunction fallacy, although he has recently given a dual-process account of people’s tendency to violate the law of conjunction (see Evans, 2007a, pp. 139-141). It is lucky that Jonathan has not been able to study everything, as this has left work for the rest of us to do, and conjunction fallacies have been studied experimentally by others working with the dual-process framework (see Sloman, Over, Slovak, & Stibel, 2003; Stanovich & West, 1998; De Neys, 2006a). In this chapter we will describe our own recent work on a variety of conjunction fallacies.
