The Effects of Problem Representation on the Sure-Thing and Substitution Principles

Abstract

This paper reports an experimental investigation of the effects of three forms of problem representation on compliance with the Sure-Thing and Substitution Principles. The most common form of representation, written problem statements, was compared with two visual representations: decision matrices with each column proportional in size to the probability of the corresponding event and tubes containing 100 labeled balls. The proportional matrices led to fewer violations of both principles. Moreover, when subjects were trained to construct proportional matrices from written problem statements, they exhibited even fewer violations.