The conjunction fallacy, confirmation, and quantum theory: comment on Tentori, Crupi, and Russo (2013).

Abstract

The conjunction fallacy refers to situations when a person judges a conjunction to be more likely than one of the individual conjuncts, which is a violation of a key property of classical probability theory. Recently, quantum probability (QP) theory has been proposed as a coherent account of these and many other findings on probability judgment "errors" that violate classical probability rules, including the conjunction fallacy. Tentori, Crupi, and Russo (2013) presented an alternative account of the conjunction fallacy based on the concept of inductive confirmation. They presented new empirical findings consistent with their account, and they also claimed that these results were inconsistent with the QP theory account. This comment proved that our QP model for the conjunction fallacy is completely consistent with the main empirical results from Tentori et al. (2013). Furthermore, we discuss experimental tests that can distinguish the 2 alternative accounts.