School of Psychology, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London, London, UK.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2021 Aug;28(4):1142-1163. doi: 10.3758/s13423-020-01870-0. Epub 2021 Feb 10.
People often fail to use base-rate information appropriately in decision-making. This is evident in the inverse base-rate effect, a phenomenon in which people tend to predict a rare outcome for a new and ambiguous combination of cues. While the effect was first reported in 1988, it has recently seen a renewed interest from researchers concerned with learning, attention and decision-making. However, some researchers have raised concerns that the effect arises in specific circumstances and is unlikely to provide insight into general learning and decision-making processes. In this review, we critically evaluate the evidence for and against the main explanations that have been proposed to explain the effect, and identify where this evidence is currently weak. We argue that concerns about the effect are not well supported by the data. Instead, the evidence supports the conclusion that the effect is a result of general mechanisms that provides a useful opportunity to understand the processes involved in learning and decision making. We discuss gaps in our knowledge and some promising avenues for future research, including the relevance of the effect to models of attentional change in learning, an area where the phenomenon promises to contribute new insights.
人们在决策中常常无法适当地使用基本比率信息。这在反基本比率效应中表现得很明显，即人们倾向于预测新的、不明确的线索组合中罕见的结果。虽然该效应于 1988 年首次被报道，但最近受到了关注学习、注意力和决策的研究人员的重新关注。然而，一些研究人员担心该效应仅在特定情况下出现，不太可能为一般的学习和决策过程提供深入了解。在这篇综述中，我们批判性地评估了支持和反对解释该效应的主要解释的证据，并确定了证据薄弱的地方。我们认为，对该效应的担忧并没有得到数据的很好支持。相反，证据支持这样的结论，即该效应是一般机制的结果，为理解学习和决策过程提供了一个有用的机会。我们讨论了我们知识中的空白以及未来研究的一些有前途的途径，包括该效应对学习中注意力变化模型的相关性，在该领域，该现象有望提供新的见解。
