Andrew Gelman meinte am 2. Feb, 23:50:
skeptical about your skepticism
Hey--this is an interesting research tidbit as well as an interesting discussion on your part. (And lots of other interesting stuff on the blog!) In this example, however, I think you're a bit too optimistic about Bayesian adjusting. These psych expts are typically designed carefully enough that they can show that the results are, in fact, inconsistent with _any_ prior distribution. Even if this particular study did not do this, there's a lot of evidence that people overweight base-rate info or underweight it, but rarely do they really do things Bayesianly.You can see http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2005/02/using_base_rate.html
for my full discussion.
Andrew
HedgeFundGuy antwortete am 3. Feb, 02:08:
I suppose you are right, in the sense that there are many scenarios where people underweight priors inappropriately. But I think those situations happen to be more contrived, hypothetical, the kind of 'gotcha' a physc professor would document. I would guess that in most situations, relating to politics or social norms, we marginally update a strong prior belief.
