Findings in Psychology
In experiments, people have been found to prefer individuating information over general information when the former is available.
In some experiments, students were asked to estimate the grade point averages (GPAs) of hypothetical students. When given relevant statistics about GPA distribution, students tended to ignore them if given descriptive information about the particular student, even if the new descriptive information was obviously of little or no relevance to school performance. This finding has been used to argue that interviews are an unnecessary part of the college admissions process because interviewers are unable to pick successful candidates better than basic statistics.
Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky attempted to explain this finding in terms of the representativeness heuristic. Richard Nisbett has argued that some attributional biases like the fundamental attribution error are instances of the base rate fallacy: people underutilize "consensus information" (the "base rate") about how others behaved in similar situations and instead prefer simpler dispositional attributions.
Kahneman considers base rate neglect to be a specific form of extension neglect.
Read more about this topic: Base Rate Fallacy
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