Rats! Rodents seem to make the same logical errors humans do

Animals, like humans, appear to be troubled by a Linda problem.The famous “Linda problem” was designed by psychologists to illustrate how people fall prey to what is known as the conjunction fallacy: the incorrect reasoning that if two events sometimes occur in conjunction, they are more likely to occur together than either event is to occur alone. Now, for the first time, UCLA psychology researchers have shown that this type of logical error isn ’t the sole province of humans — surprisingly, rats seem to make the same mistakes. Theirstudy is published in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.“The classical research has all been done with humans, so the usual explanation for the effect attributes it to a departure from rationality distinct to humans,” said Valeria González, a postdoctoral psychology researcher at UCLA and first author of the study. “Our work shows that maybe there is a more general mechanism shared between humans and rats.”If rats do, as the research findings suggests, succumb to the conjunction fallacy, they could potentially serve as good research models for studying psychopathological conditions characterized by false beliefs or the perception of nonexistent events, like schizophrenia and certain anxiety disorders, the authors said.But back to Linda. In the 1980s, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tvesrky showed that in a variety of scenarios, humans tend to believe, irrationally, that the intersection of two ev...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news