Wason, Monty Hall, and Adverse Defaults

Howard Margolis

No 514, Working Papers from Harris School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago

Abstract: The paper gives an account of several well-known cognitive illusions in terms of contextual defaults which guide intuition where familiar cues are ambiguous. When the default is inappropriate, as it sometimes must be, the result is a cognitive illusion. In contrast to Kahneman & Tversky attribute substitutions, these context substitutions are not heuristics (cognitive shortcuts) that would often give a good approximation of a correct response. Rather, they are akin to behavior in which a person instructed to look left instead somehow is prompted to look right.

Keywords: Monty Hall; Wason; Adverse Defaults; cognitive illusions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-12
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:har:wpaper:0514

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