Extension Neglect

• Extension Neglect are biases based on neglecting the sample size.

• Base Rate Fallacy - the tendency to ignore relevant statistical information in favor of case specific information. In a Bayesian manner, it involves not taking into account the prior probability (base rate) of an event.

  • Example: The tendency to say that people from a certain course have a particular quirk; The tendency to jump to conclusions based on stereotypes.
  • One reason why we ignore the base rate is because we believe it to be irrelevant to the judgment we are making, and thus we do not integrate it to our conclusions.
  • Another reason is the representativeness heuristic wherein we see a prototype for a category as representative of its whole category. Thus, what applies to the prototype applies to the whole and vice versa.

• Compassion Fade - the tendency to behave more compassionately towards a small number of identifiable victims than to a large number of anonymous ones ¹

  • Can be attributed to the affect heuristic - we make decisions when we feel emotionally attached.
  • Most apparent in the saying that “one is a tragedy, a million is a statistic “.
  • Some effects:
    • Identifiable Victim Effect - people are more willing to help a single identifiable victim than multiple non-identified ones.
    • Pseudo-inefficacy - people are less willing to provide aid once they become aware of the larger scope of people whom they are unable to help.
    • Prominence Effect - an individual favors the option that is superior based upon the most important attitude.
    • Proportion dominance effect - people are not motivated to save the maximum number of lives but are motivated to help causes which have the highest proportion of lives saved

• Conjunction Fallacy - the tendency to assume that specific conditions are more probable than a more general version of those same conditions. That is, people perceive that

• Duration Neglect - also called the peak-end rule. People’s judgments of the unpleasantness of painful experiences depend very little on the duration of those experiences

  • We remember a memory or judge an experience based on how they felt at the peak moments, as well as how they felt at the end
  • Some explanations for why
    • The representativeness heuristic - an event is judged not by its entirety but by snapshots which trigger an emotional response.
    • Individuals demonstrate better memory for events that are more emotionally intense
    • Individuals tend to remember the end because of recency bias.

• Hyperbolic Discounting - valuations fall relatively rapidly for earlier delay periods (as in, from now to one week), but then fall more slowly for longer delay periods (for instance, more than a few days).

  • People make choices today that their future selves would prefer not to have made, despite using the same reasoning,.
  • We tend to choose immediate rewards over rewards that come later in the future, even when these immediate rewards are smaller.
  • It incentivizes impulsivity and immediate gratification and blinds us to the benefits of long-term decision making
  • Some explanations for why this happens
    • We favor options that are certain. We are risk averse by default.
    • Waiting is difficult.

• Insensitivity to Sample Size - a probability is judged without respect to sample size. People under-expect variation in small samples.

• Less-is-better effect - the lesser or smaller alternative of a proposition is preferred when evaluated separately, but not evaluated together.

  • Defects tend to make something seem less valuable even when these defects are negligible
  • Some explanations for why it happens
    • Our perception of the world is context-dependent. Putting options side by side provides context for both
    • The Evaluability Hypothesis - we have a harder time evaluating some attributes than others and when we’re trying to judge objects in isolation, our impressions are much more heavily influenced by features that are easily evaluated. We lack information about what the average value is.
    • Some features stand out more than others.

• Neglect of Probability - the tendency to disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty.

• Scope Neglect - the valuation of a problem is not valued with a multiplicative relationship to its size.

• Zero Risk Bias - the tendency to prefer the complete elimination of risk in a sub-part over alternatives with greater overall risk reduction

  • Could be attributed to and enhanced by a Framing Effect

Footnotes §

1. See also This. ↩