c t w a r d y _at_ alumni indiana edu
This page last modified Sep 22, 2007
Thus, in the 1970s and 1980s, Bayesianism became a rational yardstick for the subjects in psychological experiments, but not for the experimenters who analyzed their subjects. Subjects were judged rational if their inference s from data to hypotheses followed Bayes' theorem, otherwise their judgments were recorded as an error in reasoning, such as the base rate fallacy .... However, when experimenters made inferences from data to hypotheses &em; here, whether subjects are Bayesians &em; they did not use Bayes' theorem. They used, as they had been taught for two decades before Edwards' proposal, frequentist statistics. But the most commonly used kind of frequentist statistics, R.A. fisher's significance testing, does not use prior probabilities or base rates. This was not recorded as an error in reasoning, although it had all the characteristics of the base rate fallacy. Nor do I know of a single experimenter who noticed and remarked on that amazing double standard. The split between Bayesians and frequentists not only divides disciplines today, it can also go right through the same person (Gigerenzer, 1993).
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